Cyrillic Projector Code Finally Cracked

SimuAndy writes "An international group of cryptographers, the Kryptos Group, announced this week that the decade-old Cyrillic Projector Code has been cracked, and that it deciphers to some classified KGB instructions and correspondence. The Cyrillic Projector is an encrypted sculpture at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, that was created by Washington DC artist James Sanborn in the early 1990s. It was inspired by the encrypted Kryptos sculpture that Sanborn created two years earlier for CIA Headquarters. The message on the Cyrillic Projector has turned out to be in two parts. The decrypted first part is a Russian text encouraging secret agents to psychologically control potential sources of information. The second part appears to be a partial quote from classified KGB correspondence about the Soviet dissident Sakharov, with concerns that his report to the Pugwash conference was being used by the Americans for an anti-Soviet agenda."

Comments

Congrats.

[airrage]

I have not heard of the sculpture or the problem before, however, the article talks of using pictures -- piecing them together -- is it unavailable to the viewing public (close up)?

Or was it a logistic problem of distance?

I also assume that the "meaning" of the text is that somehow, while breaking the code, you are the creator's source? There is the physical piece and then the art is the effort in breaking the problem. Does this mean the piece is less transfixing since we know what it says?

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

Re:From the article

[anzha]

Actually, potentially this could be a boon to historians depending on how much information was encrypted as such. If the NSA had gobs of it or the KGB's successor organization did and released the encrypted messages, but possibly lost the keys...etc.

Just a thought...

Re:Code Craker Likes Slashdot

[Mr.Mustard]

Yeah, mad props to Elonka. She gave a talk at phreaknic last year and has been in charge of the phreaknic code (a decryption challenge) for a few years now, if I recall correctly.

Anyway, she's very cool and she's scheduled to talk about encryption again this year.

Pictures

[MxReb0]

I just ran out and took some pictures if you wanted to see what it looks like in the day. It's much more interesting at night when the letters are projected all over.

Re:This just in, ROT-13 deciphered!

[NearlyHeadless]

How difficult is this puzzle? "Not very," Sanborn says. Not nearly as difficult as his first encoded sculpture -- a work called "Kryptos" that he created for CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., in 1987. That code, created with the help of a cryptographer, is so hard to break that the CIA "will never figure it out," he says.

So why is this news for anyone not on the UNC campus?

The person who actually decrypted this (Frank Corr) doesn't really think it's that big of a deal. It did fall to fairly standard cryptanalysis. We tried to get my 80 year-old mother to help translate it. But, given her failing eyesight, the fact that all the words are run together, and that her Russian is a little rusty, we gave up on that.

He finally put up his untranslated solution on the web last week, but didn't announce it to anyone. Elonka noticed it in her referral logs and decided to make a big announcement of it.

Besides not thinking it's such a big deal, Frank is also worried that the FBI keeps a file on anybody interested in cryptography!

Re:This just in, ROT-13 deciphered!

[nucal]

In fact, half the answer was posted on the wall, right next to that big blob of gum.