Of course, that should be synchronized….

It’s a combination of syncronized frequency hopping by the radios, and a published book of “codes”. We were trained in effective use and quick disposal of both.

See people – there you go. :)

@Teague – if you don’t mind me asking, what kind of “low fi” encryption algorithm would military employ in a situation like the above? I man, if it’s not classified that is. :)

As a veteran of the US Army, I can confirm that security of transmissions is held to be of the utmost importance, and every recruit is trained accordingly. Security in general, and communications, specifically, is at the top of my list of things I know I will almost always have to suspend my disbelief about when watching shows with military aspects.

Yep, the problem is generating truly random data, and protecting it from getting captured or intercepted. This is why it is not really used in electronic encryption that much. For manual encryption though there are few better.

the OTP is *proven* unbreakable (the only one where it can be proven, see Schneier’s Advanced Cryptography book or any other student book on elementary crypto) if the chiffre is truly random and at least as long as the message you want to encrypt. there is no attack vector to reduce complexity even if the operation is a simple 1:1 XOR.