Perfect Is Not Enough: Sixteen Laws for One-Time-Pad Systems

The public-key key agreement in wide use today is expected to fall to a large quantum computer, and every computational cipher carries the open-ended risk of future cryptanalysis. An adversary who records traffic now is betting on one or the other. The one-time pad is the only widely-understood construction against which that bet cannot pay. It is also the construction with the worst practical reputation in modern cryptography — fairly earned, but earned for reasons that are now largely obsolete. This paper systematizes what the AriaLabs Systems published corpus has learned about building consumer systems on perfect secrecy. We state sixteen laws. Each is an instance of one observation: the cipher's perfection is never the thing that fails. The cipher is perfect and the logistics are not; confidentiality is perfect and integrity is absent; the pad is perfect if its source is, and the source usually is not. We make four contributions beyond consolidation. First, we generalize an existing seven-principle operational doctrine for one-way broadcast channels to two-way consumer systems, retiring one principle that does not survive the generalization and refining three others against later measurement. Second, we resolve collisions between constructions in the corpus that no individual paper addresses — most consequentially, that in-band refill, the construction the corpus offered as the answer to recurring key distribution, moves pad without adding any, and can keep or lower a pad's tier but never raise it. Third, we state each law together with the failure that produced it; five of the sixteen were found by reading the field record against the published corpus and are stated here for the first time. Fourth, we report four field measurements for the first time — an entropy source degrading under combined load, a retry that linked one-time signing keys, burned messages that remained retrievable from public relays, and a test bench that could not fail — and correct several published statements of the corpus, among them a forgery bound, a refill capacity claim, a multi-recipient lower bound and a sequence number sent in the clear. Keywords: one-time pad, information-theoretic security, perfect secrecy, systematization of knowledge, key management, secure deletion, cryptographic erasure, security claims. ---