The Alternative to Rolling Dice for OTP Pads – The ADL-1 OTP Generator, by GuerrillaLogistician
The many facets of encryption can be daunting at best. There are many ways to deal with encryption that can be expedient while losing some of your security. If you go to one of the NCScout classes, he will go in much more detail and honestly, he teaches it far better than I can. Suffice it to say that encryption, especially digital versions, has been extremely important to everyday life for ages. From Caesar Ciphers during the roman empire all the way to the present people have tried to hide plain text messages. During the revolutionary war invisible ink was a common item along with Mask Letters. It has become even more important with technology from the use of passwords, securing financial transactions to how both parties organize protests using encryption apps. If you’ve been a long-time listener of scouts podcast you will also know many of the failures in security that were considered impossible to read. Not only have civilian organizations, law enforcement but even our government accessed private information. Sometimes they stopped terrorists form acting other times they arrested people over politics, but regardless of your beliefs one thing is clear. Encryption is a very complicated environment to understand for those we’re not actively learning about it.
With all that said let’s discuss what scout teaches and now currently sells on his website. The one-time pad or OTP for short is an encryption technique the theoretically cannot be broken if done properly. Without the encryption pad any open transmission of the message can reasonably be read as any message you could imagine within the length of characters. In as plainly as I can say this the OTP you create for encryption can be any number length you wish. In theory you could encrypt a whole novel, but as scout points out in his courses the longer you are on air the easier you are to track down. Scout uses a combination of trigram and OTP for clandestine encryption. It not only shortens the message it shortens the time you are on air. Some of you will know what a number station is and although they are dying out due to the ability to use the Internet in the same fashion they still exist.
Rules for OTP
- Keep your message as short as possible.
- Each group you talk to should have their own set of OTP pads and shouldn’t be operating off a community book of pads. This will prevent the loss of an OTP from compromising everyone.
- Make sure any OTP pads Are distributed by hand and not over the Internet. Distributing OTP pads in a compromised manner means anyone could be reading your messages.
- Never reuse an OTP pad.
OTP pads
First this isn’t an article on how to use OTP pads. I am sure not only does the brushbeater website have that information, but so does The Guerrillas Guide to the Baofeng Radio.
An OTP pad for the most part is a string of five numbers that are randomly generated over and over again to get the necessary characters for a message. The reason we don’t just write down random numbers is because humans aren’t as random as chance. Back during the Cold War Russians and most likely many Americans spent hours rolling 10-sided dice. This is a small and a simple way to create an OTP, and you know for sure That these numbers can’t be reproduce. Why don’t we just write down random numbers instead of wasting the time with dice?
35684 23876 31355 25673 Human
71110 77586 00302 55636 Dice
20715 61729 79112 62131 OTP GEN
As you can see above, they look equally random but there are no 1s 0s or 9s from the human. Also, it is rare that we string the same number next to each other. We sadly tend to follow patterns and we also neglect things. As you can see versus the dice and OTP generator briefly everything looks random, but to a good crypto analyst they will figure out patterns in the human touch out quickly. Unfortunately dice takes a long time although they are very easy to pack. So instead of employing several people in rolling dice and writing down OTP pads we can rely on the power of chips to do our work. You can go online and pull a random OTP generating app for many locations. You then could transfer onto a computer that has no access to the Internet and possibly create some very random pads. Provided the author of the app isn’t setting you up with software to fool you with. Luckily for us a bunch of hackers and nerds have done a lot of the footwork for us. Partisan labs produce an all-in-one OTP generator that will not only print out your OTP it will also print instructions on how to use the OTP properly. This generator is open source, readable hackable or modifiable by you or others. The hacking community has gone over this generator several times and found no faults in the coding. They are a known entity and lean in on the patriotic side of things. For those who know who AmRRON they are closely tied to those guys.
Several other places have sold similar devices as partisan labs, but don’t tend to stick around. With that said if you go to brushbeater store you will find he sells the exact same generator. Partisan labs aren’t the only people who make these devices Although they tend to be the ones that have stayed in business full time. I have owned one of these for a while now and while very simple they come with a small learning curve and some points you will need to remember.
If you have any issues with your OTP generator partisan labs will help you. Mine was purchased from ready made resources. I had an issue with a faulty printer after some heavy use, and they fixed my unit no issue.
ADL-1
https://brushbeater.store/products/adl-1-one-time-pad-printer
Not every person who preps or the potential partisan needs one of these. This device is a time saver and a force multiplier for groups. If you must deal with people across a region this device is for you, or if you happen to be the commo specialist you will want this. Realistically all this can be done with dice and time, but with this device you can securely make an OTP pad make an exact copy without the use of a copy machine. There are some drawbacks to this machine which should be noted so you don’t put yourself or people into a bind.
This device works on an entropy-bas