That’s no longer a one time pad. That’s closer to a homebrew stream cipher with the weakness of having a key that you just hope no one notices.
I’m certainly not an expert.
But could you generate pads from mutually accessible data sources?
Like use hit_me_baby_one_more_time_not_a_virus.mp3 appended with a password, as a seed in a pseudo random number generating algorithm, then do the same thing with another data source, repeat however many times, then XOR the generated numbers together, and use the result as a pad?
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
m0darn@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
Neat, yeah Wikipedia says steam cipher approximate one time pads but can also be completely insecure.
I think it would take one hell of an effort to crack, it would be like 3MB encryption right? Or if they guessed the scheme they could try all mp3s ever torrented XOR’ed in every possible combination.
Idk I think there’s something workable there but I only having a casual knowledge
Also I think OP wanted pen and paper so maybe use a book instead digital files.
pageflight@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Steganography may be interesting in that vein. Hiding data within larger images / sound files etc.