Originally posted by Red_Woman
Question: The one-time pad in cryptography, is impossible to crack because you need a one-time pre-shared key? Is that the only reason?
yeah, the idea is that you and your recipient have the same list of preshared keys. one message is sent with the first key, the recipient decodes it and discards the key, then the next message sent uses the next key on the list. similar idea to rolling codes - even if someone gets a key, it only decodes one message, not the entire conversation.
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Originally posted by Red_Woman
Question: The one-time pad in cryptography, is impossible to crack because you need a one-time pre-shared key? Is that the only reason?
Lanny would know better, but aren't one-time pads still vulnerable to letter-frequency analysis? Unless your pad adjusts for that.
Originally posted by aldra
yeah, the idea is that you and your recipient have the same list of preshared keys. one message is sent with the first key, the recipient decodes it and discards the key, then the next message sent uses the next key on the list. similar idea to rolling codes - even if someone gets a key, it only decodes one message, not the entire conversation.
Oh so it's one key - one msg. I was reading this books about different spies and the OTP was mentioned, and said it was possible to crack, but didn't go into details. That wasn't the subject anyway, but I was curious why was that the case. I knew about the pre shared key, but that was it.
it was probably the algorithm itself they cracked - if I remember right the german enigma machine was weak largely because it used a lot of constants; time and date and the like so they wouldn't need to preshare new keys across the entire fighting force every day
