2 ms·

> Looking back at the incident now, one can see that the French semaphore system was hopelessly insecure,... Actually, this would have been an ideal applicatio

> Looking back at the incident now, one can see that the French semaphore system was hopelessly insecure,... Actually, this would have been an ideal application of one-time-pads for end-to-end encryption of the sensitive information, needing no modern tech beyond pencil and paper. The pads could have been passed by hand between participants and would have been highly secure.

Udik 8y ago
It seems that messages were actually "encrypted" and "compressed" with a shared code book. But encryption wouldn't have changed anything in this particular case: nobody was altering or decoding the authentic messages, they were just piggybacking on the error correction codes to insert more information. Very clever.