Public Key Cryptography (PKC) is a technological tool that enables participants to confirm their identity with each other electronically. Traditional signatures have been around for thousands of years, originally being used to mark artwork such as pottery with the identity of the creator. However, as the concept of currency and contracts spread across the globe, so did the use of signatures. Although signatures were adequate for society's needs, and still are as a whole, they clearly did not satisfy the demands of electronic security.
When governments began to learn of the potentials of PKC, they endeavored to keep the technology to themselves. In the early 1970s, while working for the British government, James Ellis (1924- 1997), Clifford Cocks (b. 1950), and Malcolm Williamson (b. 1950) contributed to its development. It was only in 1997, under a new government "openness" policy, that it was revealed to the world that Britain had developed PKC twenty-four years previously. Numerous text books had been written on the subject in the intervening years, and, frustratingly for Ellis, Cocks, and Williamson, the texts had credited Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkle, and Whitfield Diffie of Stanford University with the discovery of PKC.
To accurately describe PKC would be a long and complicated process. However, the fundamental point to PKC is that it allows two computers or people to communicate in impenetrable privacy (there is no known way to maliciously decipher the code). Exactly who should be credited with the mathematical trick for this encryption process seems irrelevant now, given that it is used so widely across the Internet. Many people will have used it online via a transaction that was secured through PKC.
