hidden in plain sight

From Modern Mechanix

"The use of cryptography to secure communications from hostile, or at least unintended, interception has been around for centuries, ultimately evolving into a highly technical branch of information theory using sophisticated mathematical algorithms to scramble messages. Most encryption techniques developed prior to the past few decades have demonstrated weaknesses and are trivial to crack with modern computational horsepower. However, one now-ancient algorithm, the one-time pad, or OTP, seems to defy history’s dustbin by regularly popping up by promising insurance against radical new computational advances.
     Originally developed by Gilbert Vernam at Bell Labs in 1917, OTP’s appeal rests on work done years later when information theory giant Claude Shannon proved its absolute theoretical impenetrability. Yet, as the saying goes, 'In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.' Real-world implementations of one-time pads exhibit shortcomings that invalidate the algorithm’s theoretical perfection and have earned it a healthy dose of disdain within the professional cryptographic community. [...]
     Key distribution is much more problematic, to the point of being paradoxical. According to security expert and author Bruce Schneier, 'One way to look at encryption is that it takes very long secrets—the message—and turns them into very short secrets—the key. With a one-time pad, you haven’t shrunk the secret any. It’s just as hard to courier the pad to the recipient as it is to courier the message itself. Modern cryptography encrypts large things—Internet connections, digital audio and video, telephone conversations, etc.—and dealing with one-time pads for those applications is just impracticable.'  Schneier adds, 'What a one-time pad system does is take a difficult message security problem (that’s why you need encryption in the first place) and turn it into a just-as-difficult key distribution problem.' ”
— Kurt Marko, Processor
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