#misadventures in classical cryptography

[sprinklecipher]

Barbie Enigma Wheel

A while back I found out that there was a Barbie typewriter that had some basic encryption functionality to it, and, being a Very Normal lady, I thought it would be neat to have a Barbie-themed encryption device that offered a bit better cryptographic security. So, I got a polyalphabetic cipher wheel off Etsy and finished it in Barbie colors. I was initially planning to add decals to it as well, but I couldn’t find anything that looked decent with it.

The gist for how it works to encode is that you alternate which of the wheels you use for the input (so for the first letter, you’d encode by pointing a letter to the arrow on the first wheel, then you’d switch to the second, and so on).    

I couldn’t decide at first whether I wanted the wheels to be purple or teal, so I went with purple for the front and teal for the back. In hindsight, the teal probably captures the Barbie typewriter vibes better than the purple, but oh well.

Also, random word to the wise, don’t use Mod Podge on the teal color of Unicorn Spit—it’ll mess everything up horribly (even though it works just fine with the purple and pink colors).

[sprinklecipher]

The Sprinkle Cipher

I came up with the ‘sprinkle’ part of my username in a pretty arbitrary way, but ever since I picked out the username, I’ve thought about what a sprinkle-based cipher might actually look like. Combining different types or colors of sprinkles seemed like the most logical approach, so I came up with a simple substitution encryption scheme that can encode letters using specific combinations of five different sprinkle types.

Each sprinkle type (1-5) could theoretically be any kind of sprinkle, although it would be best for each type to be as clearly distinct from the others as possible to reduce the possibility for confusion. The best application of this cipher would be to use different combinations of sprinkles on a set of cupcakes or cookies to encode the message (so each individual cupcake/cookie would correspond to one letter, based on which combination of sprinkles it had on it), but the same principal could be applied to other things as well.

Here's a chart depicting the sprinkle-combinations that are associated with each letter using my encryption scheme.

I assigned the sprinkle combinations to letters so that the most frequently occurring letters would only require one or two sprinkle types. With that in mind, here’s the chart again, but sorted to letter-frequency order:

To help visualize what it might actually look like to use a cipher like this, I wrote a script to make images of “cookies” with the appropriate combination of sprinkle types to correspond to a letter. For this visualization, I went with pink, blue, red, lavender, and dark purple sprinkle colors to represent the respective sprinkle types, but, again, the specific kind of sprinkles can be varied. The resulting “cookie” pictures may be ugly MS paint-looking abominations, but I think they convey the general idea well enough. Here’s an idea of how the cookie-alphabet would look:

Letters A-O

Letters P - Z

And here’s an example of the cipher being applied to form a message:

I probably could have selected better colors, but I think the proof-of-concept is promising enough that I could see actually using this IRL at least once (although I recognize that that position is very much a “me” thing).

In conclusion, here’s my 100% objective evaluation of this new encryption method:

Pros of the sprinkle cipher:

Cute

Potentially delicious

Plausible deniability—the fact that there’s an encoded message at all is not obvious (see steganography for more on this kind of thing)

Can be used to wish your weird cryptography friend a happy birthday in a way that they will appreciate

Great way to passive-aggressively vent frustration towards people you dislike but have reason to provide food for. You could encode a snarky message on cupcakes for a potluck attended by bad coworkers, for example

Cons of the sprinkle cipher:

Poor communication potential. Difficult pattern to remember for both encoding/decoding purposes

Requires five visually distinct types of sprinkles to implement, which may be impractical (although counterpoint: sprinkle shakers that have 6 different sprinkle types are not all that uncommon)

Possible message length may be limited by the number of cookies/cupcakes/etc. that you are able to bake for the occasion

If your bad coworkers begin to suspect that you have taken out your frustrations on them via the cupcakes you brought to the potluck, they will probably not consider that you have done so using a sprinkle-based substitution cipher and may instead believe that you did something more serious, like spike the cupcakes with laxatives. This could cause problems for you

[sprinklecipher]

Letter Dice Update

Adding a photo that gives a better sense of just how big the 26-sided die is

I wasn't kidding about the apple thing!

[sprinklecipher]

Birthday Bats

In celebration of my birthday, I made bat cookies, with lots of sprinkles! :)

Contrary to what you might think, they’re actually shortbread cookies and not sugar cookies. This is because sugar cookies, unlike shortbread cookies, are terrible.

Here’s the recipe I used. The cookies are definitely very good but be warned: the expected quantity the recipe gives is way off. It says it makes “2 dozen,” but I ended up with just shy of 50 cookies. I used somewhat smallish cookie cutters, to be fair, but I would have done a half batch if I had realized just how much cookie dough it would be.

Also, you can’t really tell from the photos, but the frosting is actually a light purple and not gray.

Roughly this (from here):

[sprinklecipher]

Some tags for navigation

My stuff:

#sC original, #sC replies, #My Polls

#Misadventures (for miscellaneous personal projects, especially for things I'm not very good at)

#Bug Map (for Bug Map), #Potato Bug Map (for the follow-up)

#Ace Attorney in Graphs, #Overanalyzing Ace Attorney

Other common tags/topics:

#Graphs, #Classical Cryptography, #Sprinkles

#Maps, #Statistics

#Reblog, #Polls

#Ace Attorney, #Professor Layton, #Puzzle Agent

A Brief Intro

I’ve created this blog to use it as a repository for write-ups of the various unusual projects I end up doing and to catalog whatever random flights-of-fancy I’m having at a given time. I spend a lot of time learning about various data science-y things and practicing how to implement them in Python, and I like to come up with my own projects whenever I do. The projects I come up with tend to skew pretty weird, so consider this a warning.

Some topics that will probably come up:

Classical cryptography

Weird programming / data analysis exercises

Graphs (just in general)

Sprinkles

I’ve been on an Ace Attorney kick lately (just played through the first game for the first time last September and have been gradually playing through the series ever since then), so there will probably also be a lot about that. One very, very fringe strength of the Ace Attorney series is that there’s a lot of possible directions for data analysis with the kinds of publicly available information that AA has, so I’ve been using AA data as the basis for most of my coding practice lately. It’s a great source for unnecessary and inexplicable graphs, which the world could always use more of.