List of cryptographers

Pre-20th century

• Leone Battista Alberti, polymath/universal genius, inventor of polyalphabetic substitution (see frequency analysis for the significance of this -- missed by most for a long time and 'dumbed down' in the Vigenère cipher), and what may have been the first mechanical encryption aid. Alas, as for Leonardo, no home page.
• Giovanni Battista della Porta, author of a seminal work on cryptanalysis. No home page.
• Johannes Trithemius, inventor of tableaux (tables) for use in polyalphabetic substitution, and a seminal early work on steganography. No home page.

Pre-Computer

• Charles Babbage, UK, 19th century mathematician who, about the time of the Crimean War, secretly developed an attack against polyalphabetic substitution cyphers. His development was published independently some decades later by Kasiski, a Prussian officer. Babbage also designed, and had partially built, the first programmable digital computer, the Analytical Engine. He first designed and had partially built the Difference engine for reduced errors in the preparation of mathematical tables -- spcefically including navigational tables, thus accounting for the interest of the British Government in the project.
• Alistair Denniston, UK, director of GC&CS during WWII.
• Nigel de Grey, UK, member of the Room 40 British codebreaking team who played an important role in the decryption of the Zimmermann Telegram during WWI
• Elizebeth Friedman, US.
• William F. Friedman, US, introduced statistical methods into cryptology, can claim title of founder of modern cryptography
• Dilwyn Knox, UK, Classics scholar and eccentric; WWI Room 40 member who stayed with crypto between the Wars, becoming the chief cryptanalyst of the GC&CS before WWII. Broke commercial Enigma. Famous for solving problems in the bath.
• Leo Marks, UK, World War II cryptographer and SOE crypto director
• Frank Rowlett, US.
• Claude Elwood Shannon, US, founded the modern theory of cryptography (ca WWII), proved the one-time pad to be unbreakable, founded and invented/developed information theory and major aspects of communication theory, One of the principal developers of the theory of Error Correction Schemes (with Richard Hamming)
• Laurence Safford, US.
• John Tiltman, UK, British Army officer from Scotland, talented cryptographer. Contributed significantly before WWII in the era of hand cryptanalysis and during/after WWII in the era of machine assisted cryptanalysis. Worked at Bletchley Park and GCHQ.
• Alan Turing, UK, one of the most original minds of the 20th century and one the chief cryptographers at Bletchley Park during World War II. Made major contributions to the theory of computation, and can even be regarded as its originator.
• Gordon Welchman, UK, Turing's associate in the Naval Enigma Hut at Bletchley Park during WWII. Made major contributions to its cryptanalysis.
• Herbert Yardley, US, best known for his book "The American Black Chamber.

Modern

• Leonard Adleman, US, the 'A' in RSA, now at the University of Southern California
• Ross Anderson, UK, Cambridge University Professor who has done important work on several aspects of cryptography and information security, including analysis of trusted computing devices, robustness of protocols, steganography, "Soft TEMPEST"; cryptanalysed a number of algorithms; designed several including co-designing Serpent (an AES finalist) and Tiger a message digest algorithm. see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14
• Matt Blaze, US, demonstrated a security problem with the NSA Clipper chip design, published a description of a security problem with master keying physical locks, and designed and implemented the Cryptographic File System for the Unix Operating System. Seehttp://www.crypto.com
• Don Coppersmith, US, one of the IBM team which designed the entry in the NBS competition which resulted in (after NSA / NBS modification) the Data Encryption Standard
• Joan Daemen, Belgian, co-developer of Rijndael which became the AES encryption algorithm
• James Ellis, UK, staff member of GCHQ who proved the possibility of 'non-secret' encryption. That proof led Clifford Cocks to invent what has become known as the RSA encryption algorithm, and Malcolm Williamson to invent what has become known as the Diffie-Hellman protocol.
• Whitfield Diffie, US, one of the public inventors of asymmetric key cryptography
• Taher ElGamal, US(?), inventor of the ElGamal discrete log cryptosystem, and chief designer of the SSL protocol while at Netscape Communications Corporation
• Paul Kocher, US, discovered differential power analysis and designed SSLv3 See http://www.cryptography.com
• Vincent Rijmen, Belgian, co-developer of Rijndael which become the AES algorithm. See http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~rijmen
• Ronald L. Rivest, US, the 'R' in RSA, Professor at MIT and prolific crypto algorithm inventor. See http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/
• Adi Shamir, Israeli, the 'S' in RSA now at Weizmann Institute, Israel. A prolific inventor of crypto algorithms, protocols, and cryptanalytic techniques.
• Bruce Schneier, US, CTO and founder of Counterpane, one of the developers of Twofish, an AES contest finalist, several other encryption algorithms, a random number generator or two, etc. Author of Crypto-Gram a monthly newsletter on topics crypto and several influential books. See http://www.counterpane.com,
• David Wagner, US, discovered attacks on many widely deployed algorithms and was one of the developers of Twofish, an AES contest finalist

Here is a list of links to cryptographers' home pages: http://www.swcp.com/~mccurley/cryptographers/cryptographers.html This link should stay here only until we make a good enough list, (but some such should perhaps stay as a link anyway?).

See also: cryptography

Referenced By