Also I did hear tell that Bruce Schneier was working on a crypto algorithm which was designed to work with playing cards, for a book which Neal Stephenson is writing. Presumably painful to use, but maybe good plausible deniability, all that you need is a pack of cards.

Not even that in fact, there are methods, and I can confirm they work because I can do it myself, that allow one to memorize the order of a pack of playing cards, some people can even do it with up to 8 packs, although this requires a more complicated method. So while encryption requires one to have the cards ready (about 8 good riffle shuffles will restore a high degree of randomness to a deck) you can keep the pad for short messages in your head. But one can do the same with one time pads that use other plaintexts as the pad. Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"