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Cryptologia

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Frank Miller: Inventor of the One-Time Pad

Steven M. Bellovin

To cite this article: Steven M. Bellovin (2011) Frank Miller: Inventor of the One-Time Pad,Cryptologia, 35:3, 203-222, DOI: 10.1080/01611194.2011.583711

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2011.583711

Published online: 12 Jul 2011.

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Frank Miller: Inventor of the One-Time Pad

STEVEN M. BELLOVIN

Abstract The invention of the one-time pad is generally credited to Gilbert S.Vernam and Joseph O. Mauborgne. We show that it was invented about 35 yearsearlier by a Sacramento banker named Frank Miller. We identify which FrankMiller it was, and speculate on what might have led him to his idea. We also dis-cuss whether or not Mauborgne might have known of Miller’s work, especiallyvia his colleague Parker Hitt.

Keywords Gilbert S. Vernum, Joseph O. Mauborgne, one-time pad, Parker hit,telegraph code

1. Introduction

One-time pads are in theory the strongest possible algorithmic cipher: if the key isused properly, they cannot be broken, even in theory. The invention of the one-timepad is generally credited to Gilbert S. Vernam of Bell Telephone Laboratories andJoseph O. Mauborgne of the U.S. Army Signal Corps [38, 72]. Vernam invented adevice that would exclusive-OR keystream bits from a paper tape with the Baudotcode generated by letters typed on a keyboard; he and Mauborgne realized that ifthe keystream tape characters were (a) perfectly random, and (b) never reused,‘‘the messages are rendered entirely secret, and are impossible to analyze withoutthe key’’ [72]. (To be sure, others have made similar assertions about their ciphers;Vernam and Mauborgne’s claim has the advantages of being both correct and math-ematically provable.) Shortly afterwards, three Germans, Werner Kunze, RudolfSchauffler, and Erich Langlotz, adapted the principle to superencipherment of code-books [38].

In fact, they were anticipated by about 35 years. In 1882, a California bankernamed Frank Miller published Telegraphic Code to Insure Privacy and Secrecy inthe Transmission of Telegrams. In it, he describes the first one-time pad system, asa superencipherment mechanism for his telegraph code [51].1 If used properly, itwould have had the same property of absolute security.

Although in theory Miller can claim priority, reality is more complex. As will beexplained below, it is quite unlikely that either he or anyone else ever used his systemfor real messages; in fact, it is unclear if anyone other than he and his friends andfamily ever knew of its existence. That said, there are some possible links to

Address correspondence to Steven M. Bellovin, Department of Computer Science,Columbia University, 1214 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027, USA. E-mail:smb@cs.columbia.edu

1At my request, Google Books very kindly scanned a copy of Miller’s codebook. TheURL is listed in the bibliography entry.

Cryptologia, 35:203–222, 2011Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0161-1194 printDOI: 10.1080/01611194.2011.583711

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Mauborgne. It thus remains unclear who should be credited with effectively invent-ing the one-time pad.

We first give an overview of the state of cryptography at the time. We continueby describing and analyzing Miller’s codebook. We then explain our tentative identi-fication of the author, and speculate on possible linkages to Mauborgne.

2. The State of 19th Century Cryptography

It is worth discussing common 19th century cryptography, to better understandMiller’s starting point. The state of the art, at least in the United States, was verypoor [19, Lecture V]. Broadly speaking, two principal systems were in use,straight-forward ciphers and superenciphered codes. Both were rather simple. (Forfurther background, also see [74] and [75].)

During the Civil War, the Confederacy primarily used a Vigenere cipher (whichthey often called a ‘‘court’’ or ‘‘diplomatic’’ cipher) [59], via manual tables [19, LectureIV]. A Vigenere square was also used by John Wilkes Booth and others in their plotagainst Lincoln. The Confederacy often used meaningful phrases as high-level keys; inFebruary 1865 they switched to ‘‘Come Retribution’’ from ‘‘Complete Victory’’ [71].

The Union employed a cipher disk to implement an easy-to-change monoalpha-betic substitution. The key—that is, the rotation—could be changed in mid-message,or by switching disks. It also employed Stager’s route transposition cipher [38, 59,75], which combined a codebook for (many) proper names with a word-based trans-position. (An advantage of transposing words, rather than characters, is that itallowed telegraph operators to correct many transmission errors.)

Codebooks were certainly not new. In some form, they go back to the opticaltelegraphs of the 18th century [69]; superencipherment goes back to the very firsttelegraph codebook, compiled by Smith in 1845 [64]. His codebook represented eachword as a letter=number pair. He described using an additive to provide confidenti-ality, and even described using different additives for different codewords:

For instances, instead of confining the pre-agreements of the parties, tothe deduction or addition of one number only, let one number be agreedon, for every alternate word sent in figures, and another number for everyother word; or, by the same rule, let several numbers be used for additionor deduction, in any order that may be agreed on.

In addition, he suggested the use of a monoalphabetic substitution of the codeletter.

Few late-19th century codebooks were much better at superencryption. The1899 U.S. War Department code [32], though intended primarily for administrativeuse, did provide for superencipherment; it was less sophisticated than Smith’s. It sug-gested adding or subtracting a ‘‘key number or series of key numbers,’’ and gave asexamples the sequence ‘‘25, 50, 75, 100.’’ It did, however, note that ‘‘the use of 50 or100, while easy to remember, should be avoided.’’

Wells, Fargo did use good cryptography internally. Their codebooks containedhomophones [22]; they also used a new codebook every year [29]. In addition, theyemployed a double transposition as a superencipherment. While protecting commer-cial messages was important, a more common use was in reporting robberies andplans for pursuing robbers. Their cipher book was first used in 1874 [22], a year after

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James B. Hume joined the company as chief detective [28]. We suspect (but cannotprove) that Hume instigated the deployment; the code was used primarily when deal-ing with robberies [22], and half of his cases involved inside jobs [28, p. 132]. Humewould have wanted a way to protect his communications against rogue telegraphoperators and clerks. In [36, p. 59], Hume and his colleague John Thacker dodescribe one robbery perpetrated by a telegraph operator. They do not mentionany use of the cipher book. (The threat from corrupt employees goes a long waytowards explaining the strong cryptography: few bandit gangs have strong SIGINTcapabilities. . . .) Interestingly, on p. 83 the book talks about a robber learning thatthe code phrase ‘‘Red Coat’’ meant that a large payroll shipment was being sentto a particular mine; he then sent a ‘‘ciphered message’’—prearranged words[77]—to his confederates who would actually rob the train.

One well-known, public codebook stood out. Slater’s Telegraphic Code, toEnsure Secresy in the Transmission of Telegrams [sic] [61] talked about simple addi-tives, but he also described a variety of more complex transforms. For example, hesuggested transposing digits in code numbers, or regrouping the 5-digit codenumbers into 4-digit ones. In addition, he suggested using combinations of thesemethods. Despite its limitations, Slater’s codebook became the basis of a WarDepartment code [19, 75]. (Curiously, Friedman’s discussion of Slater’s superenci-pherment focuses only on the use of additives, and misses the more complextransformations [19, p. 96].)

None of Slater’s schemes were that sophisticated. Friedman conjectures thatEuropean cryptanalysts were able to read American State Department correspon-dence with little trouble; this is certainly supported by Kahn.

3. Miller’s Codebook

Miller’s codebook has two independent components, a standard telegraph codeintended for message compression and a superencipherment system. The telegraphcode is conventional for its time: it mapped phrases into both English words and5-digit code groups. While an 1882 codebook cannot be rated against the very soph-isticated works produced in the 1920s and 1930s, it does not appear to be a particularlygood compression system even when ranked against its peers. Contrast a page fromMiller’s book (Figure 1) with one from Bloomer’s 1874 codebook (Figure 2), anotherone intended to provide confidentiality [25]; in general, Miller maps a single plaintextword into a single codeword, though there are glaring exceptions such as the entireparagraphs that are represented by FESTIVAL or FESTIVITY, while most ofBloomer’s code words represented phrases. (Bloomer also understood security betterthan most. Although he did not carry out the work himself, he apparently recognizedthe virtue of two-part codes; the book provides instructions on how to generate oneand blank columns in which to write alternate code numbers.)

One of Miller’s codewords, GUINEAPIG, is interesting both because it showsthe limitations of the code but also for what it says about authentication over theyears:

Frank Miller 205

Mother’s maiden name, that old standby ‘‘secret,’’ was used that way at least asearly as 1882.

Note, though, that there is a crucial security failure here: that codeword, suitablyshifted, is to be followed by the secret, and the secret almost certainly has to be inplaintext: there won’t be a codeword for most family names. The appearance ofsomething that looks like a family name and is a word not in the codebook would

Figure 1. A sample page from Miller’s codebook. Note the general lack of compression; mostcodewords, with a few exceptions and a few glaring exceptions, represent a single plaintextword rather than a phrase.

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Figure 2. A sample page from Bloomer’s codebook. The blank columns permit conversioninto a two-part code. (Image from Google Books).

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quite likely be of interest to any eavesdropper. The alternative is using codewordsto spell out the name, but that will result in a large expansion of the message andhence an increase in cost. This, of course, is a failure mode of all codebooks, not justMiller’s, but it does show the limitations of Miller’s code for one of its intended pur-poses. (We note that the 1899 Preliminary War Department Telegraphic Code [31]included codewords for all officers then in the Army, to avoid precisely thisproblem.)

Miller’s codebook was not as easy to use as some. It mostly lacked subject divi-sions; encoders would have had to find each phrase alphabetically, and perhapsguess at precisely which word the phrase was indexed under. A clerk who is experi-enced with a given codebook would be less inconvenienced; this, however, creates abias in favor of sticking with more familiar works. (Familiarity can help. LordNelson’s famous signal ‘‘England expects that every man will do his duty’’ originallystarted ‘‘England confides that . . .’’. However, his signal officer immediately pointedout that ‘‘confides’’ was not in the codebook, and hence would be slower to send,whereas ‘‘expects’’ was. Nelson agreed to the change [31].)

Given the poor compression and usability, and given that telegraph codebooksare subject to a network effect—a codebook owned by many recipients is more valu-able to a sender than one owned by just a few—we suspect that it was little-used inpractice. Miller did send copies to the major banks in New York, San Francisco,Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans; the question, though, is what would haveimpelled them to use it over others they were more familiar with. The problemwas likely exacerbated by a lack of marketing: Miller had a full-time job as a banker,and probably couldn’t spend his time persuading other banks to use his code book.As in so many other fields, marketing is extremely important when selling codebooks[38, 39].

There is one intriguing data point that suggests that perhaps there was some useof Miller’s codebook. The New York Public Library’s copy lists a few additionalholders of the book (Figure 3). That list of recipients does not appear in either the

Figure 3. The list of recipients in the New York Public Library’s copy. (Image from GoogleBooks).

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Library of Congress copy or the University of Chicago’s copy. This latter wasdonated to the university in 1884 by Frederick W. Gookin, a banker, artist, andcurator; he presumably donated it because his bank had no use for it. The New YorkPublic Library’s copy, donated in 1916 by the Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations,does have the list. Why the difference? Was the book reprinted? If so, why? Did thesepeople actually use it? (We have not been able to discover which copy was donated.D.O. Mills died in 1910; Whitelaw Reid died in 1912. It may have been from estate ofone of them.)

On the other hand, one of the other people on the list was C. F. Crocker, vicepresident of the Southern Pacific Railroad and the son of Charles Crocker, one ofthe builders of the transcontinental railroad. C. F. Crocker is also listed as one ofnine holders of a numbered copy of a private codebook apparently used for confi-dentiality by some of the most powerful people in late 19th century California,including Mrs. Leland Stanford [5]. They not only did not use Miller’s scheme,the cryptography in their codebook was weak even by the standards of the day,despite the fact that they clearly had access to excellent cryptography.

One unusual feature of the codebook does warrant further attention. As withvirtually all codebooks, this one has blank positions for user-supplied plaintext;see, for example, the middle section of Figure 2. Miller, by contrast, provided about20 pages of pair-wise lists of extra words; each such page was intended for correspon-dence with a different individual (Figure 4). This clearly shows his orientationtowards point-to-point communication, rather than one-to-many or many-to-many.Any realistic use of one-time pads would indeed require point-to-point messaging.A broadcast scenario, where one party sent to multiple others, would require every-one to have a receive-only list; Miller does not describe any such thing. Given thelack of broadcast transmission media in 1882, this is not surprising.

Miller’s superencipherment, by means of additives and modular arithmetic, ismuch more interesting. As noted earlier, additives were well-known. Miller, however,identified the essence of the one-time pad: randomness and non-repetition [emphasisin the original]:

A banker in the West should prepare a list of irregular numbers, to becalled ‘‘shift-numbers,’’ such as 483, 281, 175, 892, & c.

The differences between such numbers must not be regular.When a shift-number has been applied, or used, it must be erased

from the list and not used again.A copy of the list is to be sent to the New York Banker, who prepares

a different list and sends copy thereof to the Western Banker.

Figure 4. Blank codewords, for use with a particular correspondent.

Frank Miller 209

It seems clear that Miller understood the threat he was countering: ‘‘Any systemwhich allows a cipher word to be used twice with the same signification is open todetection. A little talk with a telegraph operator will convince one of this fact.’’One can, of course, question how deep his understanding was of the cryptanalyticthreat, but it’s hard to be clearer than that in a single sentence.

Is this a true one-time pad? Kahn defines such a system as one consisting of ‘‘arandom key used once, and only once’’ [38 p. 398]. That Miller understood the‘‘once, and only once’’ part is clear. But is ‘‘the differences . . .must not be regula’’equivalent to ‘‘random’’? We submit that it is. He stressed the phrase, showing thathe thought patterns were a serious, exploitable flaw. It would have been nice,though, if he had explained techniques for generating the additives, and if his sam-ples had not all been 3-digit numbers. (According to Kahn, Vernam and his collea-gues used ‘‘characters drawn from a hat’’ for keying material.)

Miller also thought about the threat model. He suggested that messages thatcould be sent verbally by a messenger need not be encrypted, though he also notedthat as a practical matter not many people in a town would possess the codebook.Even then, however, he realized that messages needed to be authenticated, even ifnot encrypted. To this end, he provided a list of 100 ‘‘test words’’; a sender wouldtake the next available shift-number modulo 100 and use that to select the appropri-ate test word. The receiver would verify the test word against his list of shift-numbers; both parties, of course, would cancel that value. Miller does not seem tohave considered that a telegraph operator could substitute a different messageto one protected by a simple authenticator, nor does he mention that receiversmust be properly trained to insist that all messages be authenticated. By contrast,a separate codebook by Slater, one that focuses on message authentication, recog-nizes both problems [62, pp. 4–5]:

In very many cases, however, and it is surprising in how many, the recei-vers of messages purporting to come from some well-known correspon-dent, take it for granted that every telegram which so reaches theirhand must be genuine, and, without further consideration of the conse-quences, act upon it.. . .There still remains, however, the possibility of a fraud being committed,as it were, over the blank signature of the sender, by a dishonest servantwho may be entrusted to carry to the telegraph office the message it isintended to transmit, inasmuch as he would have it in his power to sub-stitute another message drawn up in his own interests and certified by hismaster’s test, or to interpolate some additional words of his own.

and

Nothing then is easier for a dishonest cable operator than the commissionof a fraud of gigantic extent.

The concept of the test word as a message authenticator appears to have been rela-tively new to telegraphy at the time. ‘‘Test word’’ itself appears to have been areasonably-common 19th century phrase for actions or writing designed to prove some-thing or someone authentic or genuine. The Freemasons are claimed have employed a

210 S. M. Bellovin

secret test word [24, p. 86], as did the Templars [27, p. 122] and the Ku Klux Klan [20,p. 24]. (Though [24] and [20] are works by outsiders attacking the Freemasons and theKlan, that does not affect our point: both works use the phrase ‘‘test word’’ withoutfurther explication, buttressing our assertion that readers were familiar with the con-cept.) The earliest use we have found in telegraphy was just six years before Miller,by Slater [62]; in essence, he suggests use of a book code to authenticate messages.He also gives a number of variants to protect the date, word count, etc. Interestingly,he suggests using sentences; this way, a missing word can indicate that a particularmessage was never received. Miller put the phrase ‘‘test word’’ in quotes, as if his audi-ence might not be familiar with it in this context. It is unclear if Miller was familiar withSlater’s book (which was much less well known than his secrecy code [61]). While we donot know if Miller was a member of any quasi-secret fraternal organization, he was anofficer of the Grand Army of the Republic [56], a Civil War veterans’ association whichis said to have used Masonic rituals [42] and certainly kept them secret [23].

Use of test words in telegrams did become commonplace later on. Lieber [50]references the phrase, though without explanation. Fradkin [29, p. 155] describeshow Wells Fargo used test words on internal telegrams, though he does not say justwhen this started.2 By the time of World War I, test words were sufficiently commonthat there were special provisions in the censorship regulations to accept such wordsthat were not in the standard codebooks [17, p. 40]. A banking textbook [49, p. 170]gives a detailed explanation of how test words are added and verified by a specialdepartment in the bank.

Checksums appear to date from the sameperiod asMiller’s book. For example, dur-ing an 1881 meeting of the Royal Astronomy Society, Lord Crawford said [57, p. 170],

Mr. Ritchie opened a communication with me a short time ago, with a viewof introducing a method, which he andMr. Chandler had contrived, for thedespatch of astronomical information of interest. By this method the ele-ments and the ephemeris, which are comprised in twelve lines of printing,were transmitted in sixteen words on a cipher telegram. We cannot gowrong in the telegram, because one test-word checks the whole message.

The full scheme was published a few years later by Chandler and Ritchie [26].For all its cryptographic sophistication, we doubt that Miller’s superencipherment

system was ever used in practice: there are some serious operational deficiencies. Themost important is the lack of any indicators to show where in the shift-number list thesender started; the scheme as described assumes that all messages are delivered,received, and decrypted in order. This is not a realistic assumption; a high-priority tele-gram composed late in the day would arrive before a ‘‘night letter’’ composed earlier.Real-world one-time pads generally use something like a page number=additive num-ber pair to show where to start decrypting. There is one nod in that direction—thecodeword PECCADILLO means ‘‘For this and all other dispatches from us

2The first Wells, Fargo codebook dates to 1874; the Library of Congress has not beenable to locate their copy, nor have we found another source. The Wells Fargo HistoricalServices office has codebooks dating only to 1877. Information from [22] suggests that in1883 the test words were as much indicators to denote the length of the message. Still, if theywere changed frequently enough they would serve as authenticators.

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we beg that you will use ‘shift-numbers’ from our list commencing next belowNumber—’’—but that is rather clumsier than using indicators routinely.

There are also two codewords to deal with a shortage known to one side but notthe other. PEBBLES means ‘‘send more shift numbers’’; PECANA means ‘‘No shiftnumbers here available, so use the ‘plain cipher’ [the codebook without superencryp-tion] or English.’’ However, the sender’s list has to be in synchrony with the recei-ver’s; one side can’t run out without the other knowing it [73]. Possibly, the intentwas to deal with exception cases, such as loss or compromise of an additive list; ifso, one would expect special codegroups to indicate the problem, and most likelycoupled with the ‘‘send more’’ message.

4. Who Was Frank Miller?

It is difficult, at this remove in time, to be certain just which Frank Miller developedthe one-time pad system. (To avoid confusion, in this section we will refer to theauthor of [51] as the ‘‘compiler,’’ and reserve the proper name ‘‘Frank Miller’’ for aparticular historical figure.) That said, there are enough clues that—aided by happen-stance—we have come to a strong, albeit not certain, conclusion. We believe that thecompiler is the Frank Miller who later became the president of the National Bank ofD.O. Mills & Co. in Sacramento, as well as an early trustee of Stanford University [6](Figure 5).3

Figure 5. Frank Miller in 1896. (Picture taken from [56], from an electronic copy held by theUniversity of Michigan Digital Library.)

3[60] calls Miller a ‘‘founding trustee’’. Arguably, this is correct, given the convolutedgovernance history of the university [18]; however, [6, p. 9] clearly identifies his predecessorin a given Board seat.

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The codebook itself offers a few concrete details. The copyright page identifiesthe compiler as living in Sacramento. In the preface, he describes himself as having‘‘sixteen years’ banking experience’’. Sixteen years before the publication date was1866, immediately after the U.S. Civil War ended; this would be a logical time fora young man leaving the army to have started a permanent job. It also seems likelythat the compiler had at least some acquaintance with cryptanalysis.

The population of Sacramento was not large at the time, probably around 35,000–36,000 given the 1880 and 1890 census figures.4 There were 14,526 males over 21 yearsold in 1880, reducing the set still further. (That figure was not collected in 1890.)

We know that there were not many banks in Sacramento then [21, 76]. Conceiv-ably, of course, someone could have worked at other banks before moving to Sacra-mento; that said, a Frank Miller who did start at a Sacramento bank in 1866 wouldvery likely be the person we are looking for. Assorted Internet searches turned up apublished genealogical history [60] that describes a person with precisely those charac-teristics; except as otherwise indicated, the biographical information in the remainderof this chapter is taken from it. (The other valuable source was a brief 1896 biographyof Miller in Overland Monthly [56]. To modern eyes, that one starts strangely, address-ing him as ‘‘Comrade Frank Miller’’ and describing him as coming from ‘‘good oldrevolutionary stock’’, phrases we would regard as more apt for a descendant of a vet-eran of Mao’s Long March than for a California banker.) Additionally, census recordsearches via http://www.familysearch.org show just two Frank Millers in Sacramentoin 1880; one worked at the D.O. Mills bank and the other was a ‘‘laboror’’ [sic].5

The list of codebook holders (Figure 3) provides confirmation: all but one haveobvious, traceable connections to this Frank Miller. (Whitelaw Reid was D.O. Mills’son-in-law.)

Frank (or Franklin)Miller was born inMilwaukee on 18 January, 1842, the son ofHenry and Nancy Robinson Miller. His family moved to Sacramento in 1856 [60] or1857 [56] (though [1], an obituary for his father from the Sacramento Record-Union,says 1850). He attended Phillips Academy in Exeter, NewHampshire, enrolled at Yalein 1861, and enlisted in the SecondWisconsin Volunteer Infantry regiment in 1862. Hefought at Antietam and was wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run.

In 1863, Miller, by then a sergeant, was transferred to clerical duties in the Inspec-tor General’s office. The following year he was ‘‘promoted to a civil clerkship’’ in NewYork [56] working for Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, a prominent investigator of fraudand corruption during the Civil War [52, 70].6 Olcott offered to assist in investigatingLincoln’s assassination; Secretary ofWar Stanton replied, ‘‘come and bring your forceof detectives’’ [30, 52]. He was apparently effective, being described as ‘‘the most

4Data retrieved from the University of Virginia Library Historical Census Browser,http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/

5The census record for the banker Frank Mills at https://www.familysearch.org/s/recordDetails/show?uri=http://pilot.familysearch.org/records/trk:/fsrs/rr_206956290/p_334654861&hash=HloWXpZgU9zB10k5M56iYku8TUc%253D shows a birth year of 1850,which is inconsistent with other sources and difficult to reconcile with Civil War service.The other data listed agree so well with [60] that we suspect an error in the record or in itsdigitization.

6Olcott himself had a very colorful career. After the war, he became a lawyer. He grewinterested in spiritualism, converted to Buddhism, and was one of the founders of theAmerican Theosophical Society. Most of the published information on him concentrates onhis religious career.

Frank Miller 213

conscientious member of the investigative team’’ [41]. Miller apparently came withthat ‘‘force of detectives’’, though we do not know what his role was. We suspect thatit was during the 1863–1865 period, investigating various crimes and peculations, thatMiller became acquainted with encryption and perhaps cryptanalysis.

Miller’s father was the founding vice president of the D.O. Mills bank; FrankMiller was the cashier. (Context, such as Miller’s stock grant [60], and reading ofother sources from the time suggests that ‘‘cashier’’ was an executive position, ratherthan, say, a bank teller.) On his father’s death in 1878 he became vice president; hebecame president in 1893 when Edgar Mills, the founding president, died. Millerretired as president in 1904 [7]. After that, he no longer resided full-time in Sacra-mento; he and his wife traveled a great deal and lived in a number of different placesbefore settling down in Berkeley in 1910 or 1911. He and his wife moved to the Pen-dleton Hotel in San Francisco in 1905 [43] after spending a year or so in Europe; theymoved to Sausalito for the summer of 1906 [44] and ended up staying there [46],probably because of the 1906 earthquake and fire. Fortuitously, that move tookplace a few days before the quake [45]. He did plan to return frequently to SanFrancisco; he was one of the guests of honor at a banquet scheduled for 20 April1906 [9], and he and his wife had purchased opera tickets for the forthcoming season[12]. They also returned to Sacramento often [8, 10, 11, 45], as well as traveling toOregon where Miller had significant business interests [7].

We know little of Miller as a person. Examination of his correspondence to andfrom the president and trustees of Stanford University [4, 13] suggests that he was aforthright, blunt, almost brusque individual; he concluded more than one letter with‘‘do not bother to answer this’’ or similar words. Another letter, evaluating a pro-posed personnel policy, concluded with ‘‘He is not so competent, nor is any otherman.’’ He resigned as a trustee in 1916—a post that, from his resignation letter,he valued highly—because of ill health [13] and failing eyesight [60]. His relationswith one of his sons was strained, apparently over financial issues but with the sensethat he thought this son was rather irresponsible.

At some point, the compiler acquired an interest in communications. The code-book’s preface quotes a ‘‘Colonel Myers’’ [sic] on the value of cryptography; this isAlbert J. Myer, the father of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and the quote is slightlyparaphrased from from Myer’s classic work ‘‘A Manual of Signals’’ [54]. (Myer isalso considered the father of the Weather Bureau; as a result, he was sometimesknown as ‘‘Old Probabilities’’ [75].) It is worth noting that the passage does notappear in the 1864 version of the Manual [53], the only one Miller might have seenwhile in the service; it does appear in the 1866 and later editions. It is unclearwhether an ordinary soldier would have known of or remembered Myer, or beenfamiliar with that book; someone who had worked in intelligence or cryptanalysisalmost certainly would. Myer was reasonably prominent after the war, though; itis conceivable that the 1879 edition [55]—the first to be issued by the GovernmentPrinting Office—or Myer’s death in 1880 stimulated the creation of the codebook.

We suspect that the compiler did not have hands-on experience as a code orcommunications clerk or as a cryptanalyst; such a person would have been morefamiliar with indicators, message serial numbers, telegrams being sent out of order,etc. On the other hand, the preface does discuss common transmission errors ontelegraph systems (e.g., confusing some Morse symbols with others). It was com-paratively unusual to see such discussions in codebooks of that era; this may indicatemore than usual familiarity with telegraphy.

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As a prominent businessman, Miller did associate with other local businessman.One possibly-significant connection was to Felix Tracy, the Wells, Fargo agent inSacramento [58]. We know that he knew Miller [2]; in fact, he was at Miller’s son’swedding [3] a few years after the codebook came out. If Tracy had mentioned theWells, Fargo cipher book, and especially if he had explained the cumbersomeencoding process, perhaps Miller might have been inclined to think of anapparently-simpler solution. Unfortunately, we have been unable to find any evidenceto support this, save for a few newspaper articles showing that Tracy andMiller kneweach other. The best available profile of Tracy [78] makes no mention of code books.

It is fortunate indeed for our research that Frank Miller was a prominent per-son. He was sufficiently important that he was one of the original trustees of Stan-ford University and left a considerable paper trail, including coverage on the Societypages of the San Francisco Chronicle. Even more important, his descendants pre-served information about him and someone compiled it all [60].

5. Linkages

The compiler of this codebook—we are certain that it was this Miller—clearlydeveloped the one-time pad; his influence on history, however, is much less clear.It is much like the old philosophical conundrum of a tree falling in a forest withno one around: does it make a sound? Did Vernam or Mauborgne ever learn ofMiller’s work? Again, there are no firm answers; the best we can do is to speculate.

We can almost certainly rule out contact with Vernam [40]. Vernam was an elec-trical engineer whose specialty was the encryption hardware; he was not a cryptolo-gist. Kahn concluded long ago that Mauborgne, not Vernam, had the essentialcryptologic insight on non-reuse of keys; see Kahn’s endnote discussion about thedevelopment of the non-repeating key for a Vernam machine in [38].

There was not much more chance of direct contact between Miller and Mau-borgne. Mauborgne was not stationed in San Francisco until 1932 [65], well afterthe period of interest. He did pass through the port of San Francisco en route tothe Philippines [15], but any encounter with Miller would have been pure coinci-dence. There does, though, appear to have been one possible opportunity. Mau-borgne’s ship was scheduled to sail on November 5, 1913; there was a large ballto open the Portola Festival on October 23, and officers were invited [16]. However,we have not found any evidence that either he or Miller attended it. Neither is in theattendee list given in [14], though that article lists people who were ‘‘among theinvited guests’’ [emphasis added]. Furthermore, a quick scan of the Society columnsof the San Francisco Chronicle shows very few mentions of Miller after 1910.

A more intriguing possibility is contact between Miller and Parker Hitt. Hitt,an expert cryptologist and the author of Manual for the Solution of MilitaryCiphers [34], was Mauborgne’s student and colleague. In 1914, he took a majorstep towards development of the one-time pad when he wrote ‘‘No message is safein the Larrabee cipher unless the key phrase is comparable in length with themessage itself’’ [38]; his first observations along that line were presented a fewyears earlier at an Army Signal School Technical Conference [35].7 The text

7Kahn had speculated that Hitt formulated this precept before 1914. Research by CraigBauer, Drew Wicke, and John W. Dawson, Jr., has confirmed this. However, the paper theyfound is by Hitt and Lieutenant Karl Truesdell, and does not acknowledge Mauborgne.Truesdell compiled the first set of multilingual frequency for the U.S. Army [38].

Frank Miller 215

makes it clear that he was worried about Kasiski examinations in what was essen-tially a Vigenere cipher, rather than any more general principle. The text alsonotes that multiple encryption with keys of different lengths is not that strong,either; this was later relearned by Vernam and Mauborgne. It is quite certainthat if Hitt knew of Miller’s system, he would have shared the informationwith Mauborgne when they were together at the Army Signal School in FortLeavenworth.

Crucially, it is virtually certain that Miller and Hitt did meet, and under circum-stances where the codebook could very easily have come up in conversation. Hitt wasstationed at the Presidio in San Francisco June 1906—March 1907 [66]; according tohis diary, he did attend a number of social functions during that time [33], though wedo not know for certain if Miller was at any of them. More importantly, Hitt andMiller both attended ‘‘the most brilliant military ball which San Franciscans remem-ber to have seen in many years’’ [47]. This party was hosted by ‘‘the bachelor officersof the Twenty-Second Infantry,’’ including Hitt. The hosts ‘‘received the guests at theentrance to the hall, then escorting them to the ladies of the receiving party.’’ Sincethis was a party by ‘‘bachelor officers,’’ and since Miller and his wife wereaccompanied by their daughter Edith, it is hard to imagine that Hitt and Millerdid not talk. Edith would have been regarded as highly eligible; she was 25, single,an ‘‘unusually attractive, charming girl’’ [48] (also see her picture at [60, p. 445]),a former Stanford student, and from a prominent, well-to-do family. She may herselfhave been looking; marriages to officers of that regiment were regarded as quitedesirable [48]. Indeed, six months later she married another officer listed as a host,Lieutenant Matthew H. Thomlinson [46].

Given this, we are convinced that Miller and Hitt at least exchanged greetingsand probably chatted more. Furthermore, given that the ball was partly to celebratethe first anniversary of the regiment’s return from the Philippines, we assume thatMiller asked Hitt about his activities there. As it turns out, among other activitiesHitt had set up communications lines and served as the regiment’s intelligence offi-cer. He was also very interested in telecommunications [67], among very many otherthings. (Hitt had extremely wide-ranging interests. At the same conference where hetalked about key lengths, he also talked about testing dry cells. Another paper of his,never published, concerned the use of electricity for the Signal Corps [68].) Had thiscome up at all in conversation, it strikes us as highly probable that Miller—a manwho was interested in the subject, and knew of and quoted Myer’s book—wouldhave recounted his own efforts in the field. But Miller was brusque; it is also easyto imagine that his manner in speaking could have put off Hitt, who could easilyhave treated this as an amateur giving advice on telecommunications to someonewho had done it in the real world.

Speculation can only take us so far. Simply mentioning authorship of a code-book, or even a codebook and superencipherment system, is very different from try-ing to explain shift-numbers at a party. Based on the evidence available thus far, wecannot quite conclude that Hitt knew enough about Miller’s system to have beeninfluenced by it. Conversely, of course, we also cannot conclude that he was ignorantof it. Perhaps one aspect—keying material as long as the plaintext—stayed with himand influenced his comments about the Larrabee system.

Our overall verdict is ‘‘not proven.’’ For effective transmission to have hap-pened, Miller would have had to tell Hitt of his idea in some detail. Hitt would havehad to retain enough memory of it to use in in formulating his maxim about key

216 S. M. Bellovin

length, but not enough to actually credit Miller. Thus, though Miller’s idea may havelived on, if so it it was via a subconscious channel, and almost certainly through Hitt.(We also note that Mauborgne told Kahn that he came up with the idea himselfwhile working with Vernam [38].)

Drawing any further conclusions will be difficult unless more documentation isunearthed. Hitt’s papers have been scrutinized by many historians and wererechecked for us by Betsy Rohaly Smoot; they are unlikely to hold any surprises,unless there are cryptic references to Miller that would have been meaningless with-out the context supplied here (and Smoot hasn’t found any). The link to Felix Tracymay be a promising path to explore, though it is difficult to imagine what form suchevidence might take. Miller’s papers and diary may hold clues; they existed at least aslate as 1987 [60], but we have been unable to locate them. (Neither of the two obvi-ous repositories, Stanford University and the California State Library, has them.)We leave these matters to other historians who are more diligent, or who have accessto resources that we do not.

6. Conclusions

It is clear that Miller invented the one-time pad: res ipsa loquitur. His work wasremarkable, not just because he invented a secure encryption scheme 35 years beforeit was reinvented, but also because it came out of the blue. Vernam and Mauborgnewere working in the field; Vernam was trying to build a secure communications sys-tem and Mauborgne was the head of research and engineering for the U.S. ArmySignal Corps. They were the sort of people one would expect to invent such a thing.Miller, on the other hand, was a banker, whose only first-hand experience with cryp-tology (if any) was likely 16 years earlier. Still, he was not the first amateur to make asignificant contribution to the field. Indeed, Kahn has a chapter entitled ‘‘The Con-tribution of the Dilettantes’’. The most remarkable tale in that chapter is that ofThomas Jefferson, who invented a wheel cipher in the 1790s, an invention thatwas promptly forgotten and not rediscovered in his papers until 1922. Ironicallyenough, Jefferson’s cipher was reinvented a few years before that by French cryptol-ogist Etienne Bazeries; it was brought to the U.S. and refined by none other thanParker Hitt and Joseph Mauborgne.8

One can also speculate on the risks of tying a bad system—the conventionalcodebook Miller authored—to a good one. Had Miller published—and mar-keted—his superencipherment independently from his codebook, it might have suc-ceeded. Robert Slater’s codebook [61], intended only for confidentiality, was evenworse than Miller’s for compression (though it had 25,000 words, compared withMiller’s 12,800); despite that, the work went through nine editions, the last publishedin 1938 [63], and was even the basis for a U.S. government codebook [19, 75]. Thedifference was likely marketing—Slater was secretary of the French Atlantic Tele-graph Company—but regardless, Slater’s work survived and was influential; Miller’swork has been forgotten.

It is tempting to speculate on how history may have been different had peoplepaid attention. Almost certainly, one-time pads would never have been employed

8One should not draw the conclusion that Hitt was a habitual plagiarist who stole fromboth Miller and Bazeries. Kahn quotes Hitt’s memo as explicitly crediting Bazeries for thewheel cipher. Hitt was in fact punctilious about assigning proper credit [66].

Frank Miller 217

for most military communications; the operational difficulties, then as now, wouldhave been prohibitive. But what of high-level diplomatic correspondence? Kahn tellsmany tales of cryptanalysis of such messages between 1882 and 1918; might thingshave been different? Might the German Foreign Ministry been able to protect Zim-mermann’s fateful telegram with a one-time pad if they had known of Miller’s work?And if so, would the U.S. have entered World War I when it did? It is worth notingthat Germany did adopt a one-time pad superencipherment for its diplomatic codesright after World War I [38].9

Finally, it takes nothing away from Vernam or Mauborgne’s own creativity toacknowledge that Miller had the same idea. If nothing else, their system—an online,automated mechanism that operated on the 0 s and 1 s of Baudot code—was farmore usable and was the precursor to today’s computerized stream ciphers.

Acknowledgments

As always when we are doing historical research, we must first thank the genera-tions of librarians and archivists who have collected, indexed, and preserved crucialdocuments over the decades. At least as important, they help me find obscurematerials. We are especially indebted to the staffs of the Library of Congress(where we first found Miller’s book), the Columbia University Library Network,the Stanford University Library, the California State Library, the HuntingtonLibrary, the New York Public Library, and Rene Stein of the library at theNational Cryptologic Museum. Google Books deserves a special mention for itsrole in making many rare works easily available; they’ve scanned sources that wenever would have found by conventional research, because there were no rationalpointers to the works save for full-text searches. At our request, they also scanneda copy of Miller’s book.

Betsy Rohaly Smoot of the NSA Center for Cryptologic History, an expert onHitt, provided an extraordinary amount of help, checking and rechecking his diaryand papers.

William Shurtleff’s genealogy book was an extremely valuable resource; his priv-ate comments were also helpful.

We had limited time to travel; we were aided in ‘‘remote research’’ by RoyFrostig of Stanford University, who checked various newspaper archives there.

Craig Bauer and Drew Wicke of York College of Pennsylvania and John W.Dawson, Jr., retired from Penn State University at York, found Hitt’s paper atthe Army Signal School Technical Conference, confirming Kahn’s opinion on whenthe observation on key length was made, but also showing the context of thatobservation.

Marianne Babal of Wells Fargo Historical Services provided important infor-mation on the Wells Fargo codebooks and superencipherment.

We have received a lot of useful information and guidance from many histor-ians, including David W. Gaddy, and Dr. Edgar F. Raines, Jr. and Rebecca RobbinsRaines of the U.S. Army Center of Military History. Norman Polmar of the U.S.Naval Institute and David Kahn also provided very important advice and pointers.Errors, of course, are all ours.

9Neither Kahn nor his sources [37] provide any motivation for the move to one-time pads.

218 S. M. Bellovin

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