This letter seems to contain decent advice not just for WWII messages but also for people making license key schemes.

Enter keys: a cipher that uses a key is still more secure. Even if the cipher is disclosed, even if the ciphertext is intercepted, without the key (or a break), the message is secret.ย Post-war, this is doubly important as we begin to realize what I think of as Schneier's Law: "any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it." This means that the only experimental methodology for discovering if you've made mistakes in your cipher is to tell all the smart people you can about it and ask them to think of ways to break it. Without this critical step, you'll eventually end up living in a fool's paradise, where your attacker has broken your cipher ages ago and is quietly decrypting all her intercepts of your messages, snickering at you.
(emph mine)