Even before the invention of the one-time pad, cryptographic processes were developed which could generate a large number of keys and thus produce coded texts which contained as few regularities in the text as possible and thus few starting-points for codebreaking.
Dès avant l'invention du one–time pad, on avait mis au point des procédés de cryptage offrant un grand nombre de clés et produisant des textes cryptés présentant le moins possible de régularité, c'estàdire d'éléments permettant une analyse.