A one-time pad is a block of random data used to encrypt a block of equal length plain text data. Encryption is usually by way of XOR'ing the one-time pad with the message text. This process may be thought of as a 100% noise source used to mask the message. The one-time pad is secure if it is comprised of random data and is never reused. Because of this, one-time pads have limited application in modern ciphers, but are commonly acknowledged as the holy grail of cryptography.
SecExMail uses one-time pads to encrypt the ZLIB compression header in SecExMail messages.
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