[Cryptography] RIP Claude Shannon

[Henry Baker]

At 09:04 AM 2/23/2016, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>Claude Shannon was lost to us on this day in 2001; he is regarded as the father of information theory, viz: given a noisy comms channel then there are this many bits that you can squeeze through it at most.
>
>He also did top-secret crypto work in WW2.

Supposedly, Shannon worked on voice encryption for phones (a loser, in light of digitization & digital encryption) and almost certainly on attempting to decrypt 1x pads -- the precursor to the Venona project.

It was probably Shannon's job to deliver the message to the top brass that the Soviet 1x pads were indeed unbreakable, and -- short of finding a copy of the pad or evidence of pad reuse -- that 1x pad-encrypted messages would leave the U.S. in the "dark".  I can imagine the top brass then going into a hissy-fit and asking all of those PhD's to work *harder* on this problem -- a la James Comey & Hillary Clinton.