Clifford Cocks is a British mathematician and cryptographer. While working at GCHQ, he invented public key encryption, and which predates the work of the RSA and Diffie-Hellman methods. He studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Kings College, Cambridge, and then joined the Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG) at GCHQ in 1973. After his discovery of a usable public key encryption method, he went on to create one of the first Identity-Based Encryption methods and which is based on quadratic residues rather than bilinear pairings.

In 2008, he was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB). Then, in 2010, he and James Ellis and Malcolm Williamson were honoured by the IEEE for their part in the development of public key encryption. In 2015, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and, in the same year, he received an honorary PhD from the University of Birmingham. Then, in 2021, Clifford was inducted into the Cryptologic Hall of Honour.

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