Auguste Kerckhoffs

Who was Auguste Kerckhoffs?

Auguste Kerckhoffs was a Dutch linguist and cryptographer who was professor of languages at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales in Paris in the late 19th century.

Kerckhoffs was born in Nuth, the Netherlands, as Jean Guillaume Auguste Victor François Hubert Kerckhoffs, son of Jean Guillaume Kerckhoffs, mayor of the village of Nuth, and Jeanette Elisabeth Lintjens, although he later shortened his name. Kerckhoffs studied at the University of Liège. After a period of teaching in schools in the Netherlands and France, he became a professor of German at the Parisian École des Hautes Études Commerciales and the École Arago.

He is best known today for a series of two essays he published in 1883 in le Journal des Sciences Militaires entitled La Cryptographie Militaire. These articles surveyed the then state-of-the-art in military cryptography, and made a plea for considerable improvements in French practice. They also included many pieces of practical advice and rules of thumb, including six principles of practical cipher design:

⁕The system should be, if not theoretically unbreakable, unbreakable in practice.