Is Barbie’s Password ‘uiff;rnl’?

Can’t wait to crack the Barbie cipher? Try here.
Ref [here]

Is Barbie’s Password ‘uiff;rnl’?

Can’t wait to crack the Barbie cipher? Try here.

Hsana tf rea xnaih jajrnz icrqh fosrrb hsih fhtoyf te jz sailM Lh ;if hsa liz ih untjinz fosrrb hsih jz obiff ;if xtgae i fstphal ibusicah otusanW iel hsa haiosan ifyal qf hr ptel hsa jaffixaM Hr jaW agae ih ie ainbz ixaW th faajal btya hsa jrfh ;relanpqb hstex L sil orja ionrff te jz alqoihtreM

Opps. Sorry. Wrong mode on my typewriter. Let me repeat:

There is one great memory about school that sticks in my head. 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 an 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. Luckily, the joy of cracking a cypher has never left me, and I still enjoy 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]:

sabbrabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456
--------------------------------------------------------
icolapxstvybjeruknfhqg>FAUTCYOLVJDZINQKSEHG<.1PB5234067

So can you solve this:

Can you find the plaintext for the Barbie ciphertext 
for the code of uiff;rnl

For this, I’ve create a Capture The Flag for the Barbie cipher:

https://asecuritysite.com/ctf/ctf_90

and a Capture The Flag:

https://asecuritysite.com/cipher/code_barbie

So can you solve this?

Conclusion

Go fall in love with ciphers, and feed your cipher brain. Get your kids into the joy of maths and cracking ciphers. And, so, here’s are 90 cipher challenges for you:

https://asecuritysite.com/encryption/ctf