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I don’t know anything about cryptography. Would this have been useful for spies? Please tell me spies somewhere in the past were sending and receiving message
by JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
I don’t know anything about cryptography. Would this have been useful for spies? Please tell me spies somewhere in the past were sending and receiving messages on a Barbie typewriter.
- DonHopkins 8y agoIt's a useful prop for spies posing as little girls. As seen on The Americans.
- ConcernedCoder 8y agoI would say probably not, since there were only 4 variations of a simple substitution cypher, e.g. you could encrypt some text with option 1-4, and to decrypt you picked option 1-4... i.e. anyone could decrypt using the barbie typewriter and a maximum of 4 attempts... not really secure at all.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago>simple substitution cypher And for those that are unaware, substitution ciphers have been unsecure for over a millennium now. So relying on nobody guessing you used a Barbie typewriter isn't an option either.
- lucb1e 8y agoIt's much worse than that. Simple substitution ciphers are as secure as writing in a custom font: you only have to figure out which letter is represented by each symbol. This is usually not difficult when using frequency analysis or, heck, even brute force with some dictionary lookups to see which attempt contained the most existing words.
- kitd 8y agoIt's a little like Enigma, except that the substitution is static, not changing on each key press.
- lucb1e 8y agoIt's nothing like Enigma: no plugboard, no sequence of rotors that can be switched out, and (as you've noted) no new alphabet on each keypress. Enigma is not that easy to crack, even today. I wouldn't compare it to a simple substitution cipher as to laymen that sounds like it was some pretty good shit even if it wasn't as good as Enigma.
- lucb1e 8y ago> Would this have been useful for spies? Not in the slightest. If you would rank all types of encryption by strength, this would be one of the weakest ones, right between writing the text upside down and choosing a custom font.