The Barbie Cipher

There is one great memory that sticks in my head about school. It was the day at primary school that my class was given a shifted alphabet…
Reference [here]

The Barbie Cipher

There is one great memory that sticks in my head about school. It was the day at primary school that my class was given a shifted alphabet cipher, and the teacher asked us to find the message. To me, even at the early age, it seemed like the most wonderful thing I had come across in my education. Overall, it was a way that we could write secret codes to our friends, without others knowing its contents. Lucikly, the joy of cracking a cipher has never left me, and I still enjoying finding new ones to solve. It’s probably the reason I do cybersecurity … and with the art of solving complex puzzles. For my teaching and research, I finally — after many years of searching — found my great love: cryptography.

So, wouldn’t it be wonderful, too, if we could switch-on a whole lot of our next generation into solving ciphers? But, there’s a toy that can do that. For this you have probably seen a Barbie Typewriter in your time, but did you know they have special cipher coding and decoding mode? The toy itself was made by Mehano, and distributed by Mattel. One of the strange things is that it has a cryptographic function for secret writing, and with four different cipher modes. These modes are activated with a special character sequence. These modes are accessed by pressing SHIFT and LOCK and either ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’ or ‘4’ (for encryption) or ‘4’, ‘5’, ‘6’ or ‘7’ (for decryption):

Reference [here]

Overall, there is no documentation on the ciphers (apart from in the original documentation for the first version). There are four modes that can be used for the Barbie cipher [here]:

Mode abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456"
---------------------------------------------------------
1    icolapxstvybjeruknfhqg>FAUTCYOLVJDZINQKSEHG<.1PB5234067
2    torbiudfhgzcvanqyepskxRC>GHAPND<VUBLIKJETOYXM2QF6340578
3    hrnctqlpsxwogiekzaufydSARYO>QIUX<GFDLJVTHNP1Z3KC7405689
4    sneohkbufd;rxtaywiqpzlE>SPNRKLG1XYCUDV<HOIQ2B4JA805679-

and with special characters:

Mode    - ' ! " # % & ( ) * , . ¨ / : ; ? @ ^ _ + < = > ¢ £ § €
1 	¨ _ & m @ : " * ( # W M § ^ , ¢ / ? ! ) % X ' R + € £ =
2 	§ ) " j ? , m # * @ . Z £ ! W + ^ / & ( : 1 _ S % = € '
3 	£ ( m v / W j @ # ? M B € & . % ! ^ " * , 2 ) E : ' = _
4 	€ * j g ^ . v ? @ / Z F = " N : & ! m # W 3 ( T , _ ' )

Overall, it’s a simple scrambled alphabet cipher, and which can be cracked using frequency analysis. And so for “hello” using Mode 1, we get [here]:

sabbr
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456
--------------------------------------------------------
icolapxstvybjeruknfhqg>FAUTCYOLVJDZINQKSEHG<.1PB5234067

You can try your own here:

https://asecuritysite.com/cipher/code_barbie

Conclusion

We switch too many kids off coding and maths, and need to find ways to show them that these skills will be the most prized in the future … and to fall in love with maths and coding.