A theory about cryptography, originally developed by Alan Turing for one of his machines, was to give users the ability to hide messages they are carrying by encrypting the ones that do not fit the rules of the system. The result was a computer that would accept a message unless it could understand it very carefully.
"A key is a message and so every message could be written as a binary number with the code '0xDEAD' in it," writes Brian Clark in a blog. "The difference between a key and a keyed hash table is that only one message can be included in each hash, whereas for hash tables it's almost infinite. For any message there is only one possible solution, hence the word 'message' - even without a secret, the messages look alike". But that's not so for messages that aren't in the known known.
To solve this quandary, researchers worked on their own system until they discovered that it would work in reverse. By encrypting messages that match existing keys, using a form of key stretching to generate long, random strings. This is the same thing as the "sharding algorithms" popular today. However, unlike sharding algorithms, it was developed by researchers after their system had been broken to an unknown degree.
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