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11 sats \ 2 replies \ @ek 7 Dec \ on: Science is just rediscovering stuff from the 60s science

People here love Cryptography. One of the most groundbreaking and fundamental ideas in cryptography was when Shannon "invented" the One-Time-Pad in the 40s.

Unfortunately there already was a guy called Vigenère in the 1500s who discovered the same thing.

Do you mean the Vigenère cipher that was considered unbreakable for a long time?

Encrypting with the Vigenère cipher is not the same as encrypting with One-Time-Pads. Maybe you mean that OTP encryption is like encrypting with an infinitely long Vigenère key. Similar idea but different application imo.

152 sats \ 1 reply \ @zuspotirko OP 7 Dec

Yeah, read one sentence further than what you quoted :)

Vigenères did write about more than what universities teach as "THE Vigenère cipher". Including some vague (common for the time period) stuff about the length of substitution blocks, length of cleartext, length of what we would now call secret key.

In my book it doesn't really matter tho. He was basically there in my view. No need to split hairs.

Edit: There is also a lot of creative stuff from both world wars about symmetric encryption with throwaway-keys. In my view these approaches are also basically there. They just haven't haven't written it explicitly in a generalized manner.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 7 Dec

I did read further but I think you’re right. I think I was in a mood for nitpicking 👀