A New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/second-kryptos-clue/

by triggerworlds • 12 years ago

111 20 12 years ago

EGreg• 12 years ago

http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-mysterious-texts.php

jlgaddis• 12 years ago

  Be sure to drink your Ovaltine

jbigelow76• 12 years ago

A crummy commercial? Sonofabitch.

vegedor• 12 years ago

An expression of his confidence that it won't be encrypt, as he was looking at the breakfast table for a phrase?

mindcrime• 12 years ago

I'm betting the whole thing ultimately just reads:

"Hello, sweetie"

Raphmedia• 12 years ago

"Hello, world!" would be nice.

Swizec3• 12 years ago

Yes, but then it wouldn't be River Song sending a message to the last surviving Time Lord now would it?

Swizec3• 12 years ago

I'm sorry to see you got downvoted. That was a beautiful reference.

(Dr. Who for anyone who didn't get it)

ganzuul• 12 years ago

Bet the message appears at noon, midsummer's day.

trentmb• 12 years ago

I'm mostly curious as to how the sculpture got approved without anyone else knowing what it said.

fsckin• 12 years ago

Sanborn was forced to provide Webster with the solution to the puzzle to reassure the CIA that it wasn’t something that would embarrass the agency.

ChrisGranger• 12 years ago

However, in 2005 Sanborn revealed to WIRED that Scheidt and Webster only thought they knew the solution. In fact, he had deceived them.

keypusher• 12 years ago

I am inclined to believe that the 4th piece is written in a foreign language or otherwise multiply-encoded, or that Sanborn made a drastic error in the cryptography. The other 3 sections were solved independently in a much shorter time. For instance, the NSA was the first to crack the first three parts of the sculpture, and they did it in only 2 days. The fact that nobody has made any progress on the 4th section in well over a decade even with a known clue is hard to reconcile.

Then “within two days of receiving the information tasking from Chief, Z,” they had solved parts one through three of the puzzle. They spent another day on the fourth section, but very quickly “a decision was made to stop any further work” on it. “Given the suspected cryptography, the last section is too short to solve without diverting a great deal of effort from operational problems,” they wrote in the memo.

Elonka Dunin is the maintainer of the well-known Yahoo Kryptos group, and maintains the primary reference page.

http://elonka.com/kryptos/

Wired ran an interesting article about the NSA's original crack of the scultpure, which I have quoted from above.

http://www.wired.com/2013/07/nsa-cracked-kryptos-before-cia/

davekeck• 12 years ago

Apparently a mistake exists in Part 2 of the sculpture so it's plausible that there's more. From the Wikipedia article:

There are also a few incorrect letters in the ciphertext which Sanborn has said were intentional, and a few letters near the beginning of the bottom half have been displaced from their normal positions, apparently intentionally... One of the lines of the tableau is one character too long, which Sanborn has indicated was accidental.

It's tough to imagine how to start such a problem when you can't even rely on the ciphertext being correct.

smackfu• 12 years ago

If beating cryptanalysis just requires messing up a few letters, seems like a valid thing to do.

couchand• 12 years ago

Unless, of course, those are clues? From the FAQ on Elonka's page:

Q: Why are words misspelled in Parts 1 and 2? Is that a mistake?

No. Sanborn has said that those two errors -- iqlusion and undergruund -- are deliberate, but he didn't say exactly why. He did say that it wasn't what they were that was so important, as their orientation or positioning.

If there's something critical about their positioning, and given that the coordinates are for a location in the same courtyard as the sculpture, it seems reasonable that one would need more than just the ciphertext to solve it.

pmorici• 12 years ago

"It's tough to imagine how to start such a problem when you can't even rely on the ciphertext being correct."

That's a common problem in the real world. A lot of ciphertext, at least historically, comes from radio signals and if your receiver doesn't get a good copy of the signal you've got what you've got.

Swizec3• 12 years ago

Personally, if I was the artist making such a sculpture, I would just use a one-time pad, use a key that's as long as the message, and burn my notes.

Then I would laugh maniacally at the brilliance of my troll for ever and ever.

meowface• 12 years ago

Well in that case you might as well just scribble `head -c 1000 /dev/urandom | base32`.

bostonpete• 12 years ago

Sanborn realized he had also made an inadvertent error, a missing “x” that he mistakenly deleted from the end of a line in section two

I can't imagine the horror that accompanied that realization. I get anxiety when I notice a typo after an e-mail goes out. A typo into an encrypted sculpture that's so high profile must have been upsetting...

A New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture

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