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public-key cryptography

Hall of fame adds inventors of digital camera, barcode

The inventors of the digital camera, the industrial robot, public-key cryptography, and the barcode are just some of those being inducted into this year's National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Today, the National Inventors Hall of Fame announced its latest selections of the people responsible for some of the key technologies that we use and rely on today.

In 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built a device that was able to capture an image, convert it to an electronic signal, and then digitize and store that image, leading to the world's first digital camera, according to the … Read more

How public-key crypto was born

Public-key cryptography is widely used to secure online transactions. The math behind the technology was devised by U.K. Government Communications Headquarters scientists in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The discovery was kept secret to avoid revealing how closely GCHQ was working with the U.S. National Security Agency at the time. The breakthrough by GCHQ scientists James Ellis, Clifford Cocks, and Matthew Williamson only came to light in 1997, when their work was declassified.

In public-key cryptography, data is encrypted using a widely distributed public key, and can be decrypted using a private key. Cocks, the GCHQ mathematician … Read more