WEBVTT

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For over 400 years,
the problem remained.

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How could Alice design a cipher
that hides her fingerprint,

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thus stopping the
leak of information?

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The answer is randomness.

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Imagine Alice rolled
a 26 sided die

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to generate a long
list of random shifts,

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and shared this with Bob
instead of a code word.

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Now, to encrypt
her message, Alice

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uses the list of
random shifts instead.

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It is important that
this list of shifts

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be as long as the message,
as to avoid any repetition.

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Then she sends it to Bob, who
decrypts the message using

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the same list of random
shifts she had given him.

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Now Eve will have a problem,
because the resulting

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encrypted message will have
two powerful properties.

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One, the shifts never fall
into a repetitive pattern.

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And two, the encrypted message
will have a uniform frequency

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distribution.

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Because there is no frequency
differential and therefore

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no leak, it is now
impossible for Eve

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to break the encryption.

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This is the strongest
possible method of encryption,

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and it emerged towards the
end of the 19th century.

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It is now known as
the one-time pad.

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In order to visualize the
strength of the one-time pad,

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we must understand the
combinatorial explosion

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which takes place.

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For example, the Caesar
Cipher shifted every letter

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by the same shift, which was
some number between 1 and 26.

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So if Alice was to
encrypt her name,

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it would result in one of
26 possible encryptions.

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A small number of possibilities,
easy to check them all,

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known as brute force search.

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Compare this to the one-time
pad, where each letter would

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be shifted by a different
number between 1 and 26.

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Now think about the number
of possible encryptions.

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It's going to be 26 multiplied
by itself five times, which

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is almost 12 million.

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Sometimes it's
hard to visualize,

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so imagine she wrote her
name on a single page,

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and on top of it stacked
every possible encryption.

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How high do you
think this would be?

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With almost 12 million
possible five-letter sequences,

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this stack of paper
would be enormous,

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over one kilometer high.

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When Alice encrypts her
name using the one-time pad,

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it is the same as picking
one of these pages at random.

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From the perspective of
Eve, the code breaker,

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every five letter
encrypted word she

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has is equally likely to
be any word in this stack.

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So this is perfect
secrecy in action.

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