Cryptography Episode 4: The One-Time Pad

🕵️‍♂️ What if you could build a cipher that’s not just hard to break — but impossible? The One-Time Pad is the holy grail of encryption. First imagined by Gilbert Vernam in 1917 and refined by Joseph Mauborgne, it ditched repeating keys for something radical: 🔑 A key as long as the message, truly random, used only once, and kept completely secret. The magic? Combine each letter (or bit) of your message with the key — in binary, it’s just XOR. Claude Shannon later proved it: follow the rules perfectly, and your cipher is mathematically unbreakable. Sounds perfect, right? The catch — you need a random key the same length as your message, and you have to share it securely before sending anything. Without a flawless way to send massive keys in secret… well, “perfect” stays mostly on paper. Still, the One-Time Pad remains a legend — the only cipher with proven perfect secrecy. In the war between codemakers and codebreakers, this was the closest anyone got to victory. #ThinkLab #CryptoHistory #OneTimePad #OTP #PerfectSecrecy #FunFacts #STEM #Encryption #WWIIHistory #Codebreaking