High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In cryptography, BassOmatic was the symmetric-key cipher designed by Phil Zimmermann as part of his email encryption software, PGP (in the first release, version 1.0). Comments in the source code indicate that he had been designing the cipher since as early as 1988, but it was not publicly released until 1991. After Eli Biham pointed out to him several serious weaknesses in the BassOmatic algorithm over lunch at the 1991 CRYPTO conference, Zimmermann replaced it with IDEA in subsequent versions of PGP.