Kerckhoffs's Principle - Origins

Origins

In 1883 Auguste Kerckhoffs wrote two journal articles on La Cryptographie Militaire, in which he stated six design principles for military ciphers. Translated from French, they are:

  1. The system must be practically, if not mathematically, indecipherable;
  2. It must not be required to be secret, and it must be able to fall into the hands of the enemy without inconvenience;
  3. Its key must be communicable and retainable without the help of written notes, and changeable or modifiable at the will of the correspondents;
  4. It must be applicable to telegraphic correspondence;
  5. It must be portable, and its usage and function must not require the concourse of several people;
  6. Finally, it is necessary, given the circumstances that command its application, that the system be easy to use, requiring neither mental strain nor the knowledge of a long series of rules to observe.

Some are no longer relevant given the ability of computers to perform complex encryption, but his second axiom, now known as Kerckhoffs's principle, is still critically important.

Read more about this topic:  Kerckhoffs's Principle

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