Shannon's Large Impact - Essay Example

As mentioned earlier, Shannon’s paper ‘Cryptography: A Mathematical Theory’ was meant for use by a limited number of people. This classification was due because the theory as proposed by Shannon could be used by opposing forces to decode encrypted messages both from the American troops during wartime. Furthermore, it was essential to keep the content of the paper confidential to protect the technology from access by unauthorized people both within the country and in other countries, especially the Germans (Shannon, p The importance of ensuring secrecy remains evident in his writings, where he focused on exploring the possibility of realizing perfect secrecy.

‘It is shown that perfect secrecy is possible but requires, if the number of messages is finite, the same number of possible keys…’ (Shannon, p. 5). Later, Shannon would ensure that the enemy could not decode encrypted information between the British Prime Minister and the US President at the time.