Ivan Damgard is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University in Denmark. He is the co-inventor of the Merkle-Damgard construction, and which was used in MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-2. In 2020, he received the Test of Time Award for a paper entitled "A Generalisation, a Simplification and Some Applications of Paillier's Probabilistic Public-Key System", and in 2021 he received an ACM award for the Test of Time for a paper entitled "Multiparty unconditionally secure protocols. In 2010, he was elected as a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. Ivan has also co-founded two cryptography companies: Cryptomathic and Partisia.

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Chris is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Michigan. He completed his PhD in 2006 at the MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory under the mentorship of Silvio Micali. He received a Test of Time award at Crypto 2008 for a paper entitled "A Framework for Efficient and Composable Oblivious Transfer" and also a TCC Test of Time award for his paper on “Efficient Collision-Resistant Hashing from Worst-Case Assumptions on Cyclic Lattices,” in 2006. In 2024, Chris was elected as a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research and is seen as one of the world leaders in lattice-based methods.

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.

Read more: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/so-who-invented-public-key-encryption-213ceef7759