Realistically, one-time pads are unrealistic.
Consider this: in order for the system to provide any security at all, you must have an absolutely secure method of distributing the one-time pad! And if you had
that, why not simply use that method to distribute the messages? Why, you would have no need to use cryptography at all.
Furthermore, a one-time pad system is utterly defenseless against anyone who does, by some means, obtain a copy of the key. ("Lemme put it to you this way, pal... if you gimme a copy of that pad and keep ya mouth shut, you and your wife and kids all get to keep their
fingers...") If the key ever slips out, anyone can not only decrypt every message you send, but they can forge new ones. You have no way to repudiate the stolen keys; no way to distribute a replacement; no way to detect a forged message; no way to
stop the bleeding, or even to detect it!
There are serious operational problems, too. Heaven help you if the two of you ever get "out of sync" with respect to your place in the pad. Or if someone drops a letter out in transcribing a message from Morse code or whatever. Basically, if
anything at all goes wrong, you're outa luck. And, "s**t happens." A one-time pad system is just as likely as a rattlesnake to turn against its intended users... utterly failing to meet their practical needs for communication under real-life conditions.
Remember that a practical cipher-system has to be able to reliably deliver hundreds of megabytes of information securely between two parties who may never meet each other. It must be able to do so assuming an
not 100%-reliable communication channel, and to deliver the encrypted traffic at nearly the same speed as would be possible on an unencrypted channel. It must provide not only practical-security, but authentication, defense against forged messages, reliable detection of garbled or re-transmitted messages, detection of omissions and drop-outs .. the list goes on. And the whole thing should be
invisible. When you jump to an "https://..." web-page somewhere, you don't think about just how secure that transmission actually is! But, it is.
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As far as cipher algorithms go, then, there are plenty to choose from and it doesn't really matter which one you use,
as long as you do not try to "roll your own!" If your system gets broken, it probably
won't be because they penetrated the cipher-algorithm: it will be because of flaws in key-handling, or a stolen laptop, or a drunken sales-rep, or what have you.
The people who designed things like SSLv2, GPG, SSH, and so-on
did their jobs very well, and what's more, they published everything openly for peer-review. Nothing is "secret," nothing is "obscure," nothing at all is concealed. All you need to do is to pick one and use it.
