Michael Helm writes:
On Mar 4, 3:09pm, Adam Shostack wrote:
Markoff shouyld know better than this. There is a long history of business use of codes & ciphers, going back hundereds of years, and durring the heyday of the telegraph, there were fair size companies that created codebooks with (locally configurable) superencipherment systems for the market.
I thought that, for the most part, the telegraph systems described above were to reduce cable charges (1 code word instead of a 15-word sentence, a huge savings in those days).
Totally untrue. The use of encryption for business purposes goes back centuries, and there were commercial providers of blank telegraph code books all through the 19th century. The use of crptography to protect communications only declined with the end of telegrams and the reduction in the perception that large numbers of strangers would be handling your missives. See "The Codebreakers" for a history of this. Perry