Other forms of strong cryptography

[an41418@anon.penet.fi (wonderer)]

Why is it that the idea of taking a difficult problem, such
as a knapsack problem, and using it to encode ciphers,
was abandoned? Too many trapdoors? These NP-complete
type problems seem ideal since they can be verified
in polynomial time, but are practically impossible to
solve for any significant input. Verification of a solution
could be decryption, where the solution is the key,
and the problem could be used to encode the text somehow.

I understand that Shamir broke the knapsack problem. So,
is that enough reason to completely abandon this approach?
Nobody seems to talk about it anymore.

Wonderer

(My apologies to those who prefer to use this list to
 play games with pseudonyms and discuss their paranoid
 ideas. I prefer to use cypherpunks to learn about
 cryptography and its interesting applications)
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