Franklin Miller (January 19, 1842 – February 13, 1925) was an American

cryptographer Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More gen ...

, banker, and trustee of

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. He invented the

one-time pad The one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be Cryptanalysis, cracked in cryptography. It requires the use of a single-use pre-shared key that is larger than or equal to the size of the message being sent. In this technique, ...

in 1882, 35 years before the patent issued to

Gilbert Vernam Gilbert Sandford Vernam (April 3, 1890 – February 7, 1960) was a Worcester Polytechnic Institute 1914 graduate and AT&T Bell Labs engineer who, in 1917, invented an additive polyalphabetic stream cipher and later co-invented an automated ...

. Born in

Milwaukee, Wisconsin Milwaukee is the List of cities in Wisconsin, most populous city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. Located on the western shore of Lake Michigan, it is the List of United States cities by population, 31st-most populous city in the United States ...

, in 1842, he graduated from

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

and then joined the Union Army during the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and the Confederate States of A ...

, where he was wounded during the

Second Battle of Bull Run The Second Battle of Bull Run or Battle of Second Manassas was fought August 28–30, 1862, in Prince William County, Virginia, as part of the American Civil War. It was the culmination of the Northern Virginia Campaign waged by Confederate ...

. Miller's goal with ciphering was to save money by compressing telegraph messages. His telegraph code used code groups of 5-digits representing words and phrases common in commercial telegrams. His cipher added a number with 3 digits to each of the 5-digit groups. In 1882, Miller published a code-book with corresponding numbers for 14,000 terms and parts of sentences, encouraging users to use so-called ''shift-numbers'' (3-digit codes) for extra-encryption in case particularly sensitive information is being transmitted.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Miller, Frank 1842 births 1925 deaths 19th-century cryptographers Yale University alumni Businesspeople from Milwaukee Union army soldiers Businesspeople from Sacramento, California