Barbie Typewriter (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Barbie Typewriter (2015)

cryptomuseum.com

70 pointsuserbinator20 comments

I was amused by this from the article:

> As it was probably thought that secret writing would not appeal to girls, the coding/decoding facilities were omitted from the manual.

Whoever made that decision at Mattel was probably male and didn't have daughters or nieces. Just like boys, girls love ways of keeping secrets. I'm remembering the coded notes of my childhood that girls would pass between themselves and boys like me had no hope of deciphering them. Thinking about how my nieces were very happy to learn about things like invisible ink and simple ciphers. One of my niece's favorite gifts was when I bought her a diary with a locking case.

Mattel missed something here. The secret cipher could have been a big selling point for their target audience.

>Mattel missed something here. The secret cipher could have been a big selling point for their target audience.

While I agree a spy keyboard would appeal to all children, tacking the Barbie brand on it feels strange.

Imagine a box saying "Barbie Keyboard; Now with 4 unique cyphers!" The two have nothing to do with each other, unless there is a Barbie spy line I'm unaware of... searching...

Yep there is a "Barbie Spy Squad" movie released 2016. Of course.

Barbie and typewriters already have nothing to do with each other.

Sure they do. How do you expect Barbie to hold down so many jobs without her trusty typewriter to write up her résumés?

Yeah, maybe it's because I grew up with sisters, but "girls not wanting to do secret writing" (if the actual reason) is boneheaded beyond belief. "Keeping secrets in a hidden diary" is literally a standard trope in sitcoms.

> The secret cipher could have been a big selling point for their target audience.

The target audience of a toy is parents, not children.

Some parents might reject the toy due to that feature, which is bad for sales if the children want it regardless of the feature being mentioned.

If the feature were widely known, it would probably result in a lot of the units being put into the cipher state. You couldn't have a display unit at a Toys 'R' Us, without visitors constantly putting it into that state, causing subsequent visitors to think it is broken.

To be fair to Mattel, we don't know their motivation in leaving it out -- that's speculation by the author of the web page.

Although knowing their history (google "Barbie math is tough") we probably shouldn't extend them too much benefit of the doubt!

James Grimes made a video about it recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gwhx-uG5h8

It would have been amusing if someone had put in a strong cypher system. Like "pick four words at random and share them with your friend".

Barbie typewriter (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17538352 - July 2018 (50 comments)

Is this the Barbie Enigma?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine

Nothing quite that strong, it's just a substitution cypher, so there is a 1:1 correspondence between cypher text characters and plain text characters.

This table is at the bottom of TFA:

Standard characters

    Code  abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789

    1     icolapxstvybjeruknfhqg;dzw >FAUTCYOLVJDZINQKSEHG<.1PB 523406789-
    2     torbiudfhgzcvanqyepskx¢1w; RC>GHAPND<VUBLIKJETOYXM2QF 63405789-¨
    3     hrnctqlpsxwogiekzaufyd+b;¢ SARYO>QIUX<GFDLJVTHNP1Z3KC 7405689-¨§
    4     sneohkbufd;rxtaywiqpzl%c¢+ E>SPNRKLG1XYCUDV<HOIQ2B4JA 805679-¨§£

The most basic frequency analysis should allow you to crack the code even if you don't have the device or the keys.

( [*] Note: May require frequency tables for Valley Girl and TextSpeak )

fun fact: Juniper, Cisco and Arista passwords are "encrypted" like this when you list them in `show run`. it's designed to make shoulder surfing slightly harder, I guess? but like, you can also enter passwords in their encrypted form, so it really doesn't guard anything. and it causes operational screwups, since ops assumes it's actually encrypted and safe to share, when it's literally on par with Barbie typewriters.

I can't speak to Juniper and Arista, but Cisco passwords are "encrypted" with various algorithms depending on the "type" entered (and capabilities of the device). Not all of the algorithms are terrible, though it's still a good idea to redact passwords when sharing configurations anyway. There's a good rundown here: https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/17/2002940795/-1/-1/1/CSI...

I'm not sure I quite understand. Why would the password (or something derived from it) be shown at all? Wouldn't a sequence of asterisks or a random string serve the same purpose?

Because “show run” can basically be used to copy configs around iirc

Now I wonder how difficult it would be to replace the firmware to create an AES+base64 typewriter with a configurable key.

Would be tough if you don’t know the output until the full message is complete

In a block cipher you should be able to work with 256 bits at a time. You'd be typing 32 characters at a time (assuming ASCII) which get written out at once after you've somehow derived a secure key.

It's not like you can get much feedback from the system in its weird encryption mode either as it's typing out garbage, unless you teach yourself to decode the message from the top of your head (but at that point you don't need the machine to encrypt for you).

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