It’s a concern for Europeans as it is for people elsewhere in the world: there have been suggestions among governments to either outlaw, curtail, or backdoor strong end-to-end encryption. There are many arguments against ruining encryption, but the strongest among them is that encryption can be simple enough to implement that a high-school student can understand its operation, and almost any coder can write something that does it in some form, so to ban it will have no effect on restricting its use among anyone who wants it badly enough to put in the effort to roll their own.
With that in mind, we’re going to have a look at the most basic ciphers, the kind you could put together yourself on paper if you need to.
A Captain Midnight secret decoder ring. Sobebunny, CC BY-SA 3.0.
There have no doubt been cryptologists and codebreakers at work as long as there have been humans capable of repeating messages, and the strong public-key cyphers we use today were created by mathematicians who stood on the shoulders of those before them in an unbroken line that goes back thousands of years. It’s the public-key ciphers that are in the eyes of the lawmakers, but perhaps surprisingly they are not the only strong encryption scheme that remains functionally unbreakable. A much older and simpler cypher also holds that property, and it’s this that we’re presenting as the paper-based answer to strong encryption legislation. The so-called one-time pad was a staple in tales of Cold War espionage for exactly the properties we’re looking for.
To explain a one-time pad ..
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