January 2018
Intermediate to advanced
416 pages
10h 40m
English
“I’ve been over it a thousand times,” Waterhouse says, “and the only explanation I can think of is that they are converting their messages into large binary numbers and then combining them with other large binary numbers—one-time pads, most likely.”“In which case your project is doomed,” Alan says, “because you can’t break a one-time pad.”—Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

In this chapter, you’ll learn about a cipher that is impossible to crack, no matter how powerful your computer is, how much time you spend trying to crack it, or how clever a hacker you are. It’s called the one-time pad cipher, and the good news is that ...