Those who have been added in the past to NSA's Cryptologic Hall of Honor are listed at:

https://www.nsa.gov/History/Cryptologic-History/Historical-F...

While that list contains many important contributors, it is far from complete.

The most notorious of the 2023 list is Joseph Mauborgne, and among his merits is written: "He is credited as the co-inventor of the One-Time Pad".

Even if this claim, which appears to originate from the book "The Codebreakers" by David Kahn (1967) has been frequently repeated, there is no evidence for it and it seems very implausible.

The "One-Time Pad" has been described for the first time in the non-classified literature in February 1926 by Gilbert Sandford Vernam in “Cipher Printing Telegraph Systems For Secret Wire and Radio Telegraphic Communications”. Because of that, it has become known as the "Vernam cipher", even if Vernam has not invented it.

The "One-Time Pad" is an improvement of the so-called "running-key ciphers", which had been used already for many years before World War I. These are aperiodic substitution ciphers. Until the end of WWI it was believed that if the "running key", i.e. the stream of key symbols, is not periodic, that is enough to make an unbreakable cipher. The "running key" used for encryption was usually taken from the text of some book.

In 1918, two employees of ATT, Gilbert Sandford Vernam and Lyman F. Morehouse have filed two patent applications for an electromechanical implementation of the running-key ciphers, where the plaintext, the ciphertext and the running key were stored on punched tape. Vernam's patent was for the use of bitwise addition modulo 2 for combining the running key with the plaintext or ciphertext, while Morehouse's patent was for using several running-key generators with coprime periods and combining their outputs to obtain a generator with a period equal to the product of the coprime periods.

Both inventions of Vernam and Morehouse continue to be used today very frequently and they both deserve to be included in NSA's Cryptologic Hall of Honor more than most people already present there.

In 1918, Vernam and Morehouse who were in contact with Mauborgne, because the US military was a very likely customer for their encrypted telegraph, were still believing that it is enough for the running key to be not periodic. Some time between 1918 and 1926, Vernam has learned that there is a second condition, the key symbols must be chosen at random, otherwise the cipher is breakable.

Kahn supposes that Vernam has learned this from Mauborgne. This is possible, but in any case the idea cannot have originated from Mauborgne, but only from his subordinate Captain William F. Friedman.

NSA's Cryptologic Hall of Honor includes, very appropriately, at its first two positions (i.e. in 1999), both William F. Friedman and his wife and coworker Elizebeth S. Friedman.

In 1918, at the end of WWI, William F. Friedman has been the first who has succeeded to cryptanalyze documents encrypted with aperiodic running-key ciphers, busting the myth that such ciphers are unbreakable. Being the first who has created a deciphering method for aperiodic substitution ciphers that was based on the fact that the key symbols were not random, it is pretty obvious that he was also the first to understand that an unbreakable cipher must satisfy 2 conditions: the stream of key symbols must be aperiodic and random.

His work was classified, so a few months later Vernam and Morehouse were still believing in the unbreakability of aperiodic running keys, regardless whether they are random or not.

Mauborgne was Friedman's boss, so he must have learned immediately that the non-random running-key ciphers are breakable and that random aperiodic running-keys are required for unbreakability.

In the following years Friedman has collaborated with Vernam and he has invented some improvements of Vernam's system, to make its running keys more random.

So Vernam could have learned about the randomness condition either directly from Friedman or through Mauborgne. In any case, it seems impossible for Mauborgne to have had any direct contribution to the previous work of Friedman.

Even if it is unlikely that Mauborgne has been any kind of "co-inventor of the One-Time Pad", he certainly had very important contributions so he deserves his place in the Hall of Honor. Nevertheless, nothing of what Mauborgne might have done is still in use today, unlike the inventions of Vernam and Morehouse, which are ubiquitous, so they deserve more than him a place there.

Also Shannon (ATT), Hamming (ATT) and Feistel (IBM) are missing, while all modern cryptology is based on their work (Diffie is included on the list, despite his constant mistrust of NSA, so the list is not restricted to government employees). It is less known that Hamming had an essential contribution to modern cryptology. While his colleague Shannon had invented the components of all modern cryptographic algorithms, he believed that his strong ciphers are impractical for communications, due to the susceptibility to errors. The error-correcting codes invented by Hamming have solved this problem, as established later by Horst Feistel at IBM.