Comment on: “Exposed-key weakness of αη” [Phys. Lett. A 370 (2007) 131]

We show that the insecurity claim of the αη cryptosystem made by C. Ahn and K. Birnbaum in [C. Ahn, K. Birnbaum, Phys. Lett. A 370 (2007) 131] under heterodyne attack is based on invalid extrapolations of Shannon's random cipher analysis and on an invalid statistical independence assumption. We show, both for standard ciphers and αη, that expressions of the kind given by Ahn and Birnbaum can at best be interpreted as security lower bounds.