4 ms·

Ironically, the most uncrackable communications today is probably diplomatic cables to enemies (like the "red phone" which is a misnomer), which uses one-time p

Ironically, the most uncrackable communications today is probably diplomatic cables to enemies (like the "red phone" which is a misnomer), which uses one-time pad (technically hard drives now) encryption, mainly because they don't trust each others' encryption (or even sharing their encryption to their sworn enemy!) and cryptologists on both sides say that OT pads are perfectly uncrackable (which is true, assuming that no-one tampered the diplomatic box between i.e. the Pentagon and the Kremlin, for example).

tablespoon 5y ago
> diplomatic cables to enemies (like the "red phone" which is a misnomer), which uses one-time pad (technically hard drives now) encryption, mainly because they don't trust each others' encryption I don't think that's quite accurate. The Wikipedia article makes it sounds like the issue was more that they didn't want to give their adversary access to their encryption technology. In this context, OTP has the advantage of being both secure and not secret. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad#Historical_uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad#Historical_uses > The hotline between Moscow and Washington D.C., established in 1963 after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, used teleprinters protected by a commercial one-time tape system. Each country prepared the keying tapes used to encode its messages and delivered them via their embassy in the other country. A unique advantage of the OTP in this case was that neither country had to reveal more sensitive encryption methods to the other.