Sorry if these questions have been answered in posts I recently deleted, but... 1) Instead of modifying Huffman coding, isn't it more sensible to just use arithmetic coding, which is more efficient anyway, and doesn't use fixed bit patterns? 2) I would assume there's a branch of cryptography devoted to studying the protections or lack thereof, afforded by compression schemes, both by themselves and in addition to other types of cryptography. I would guess that Huffman and LZ-family codes have been studied a lot...right?? But also more general studies of the weakness of (even secret) compression algorithms as crypto methods? I mean, compression methods would tend to use methods (like table lookup) that simpler cyphers have used for a long time, only without having been designed with crypto expertise...right?? 3) Does anyone know of an easy-to-get-sources, easy-to-use arithmetic coding compression program? quote me -fnerd