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

the sad truth

[madcoder47]

In other news, the KGB has filed a lawsuit against the Kryptos Group under the DMCA, claiming that their IP has now been stolen.

The sad part of this is that in today's world somrthing similar could happen.

Re:the sad truth

[Tackhead]

> In other news, the KGB has filed a lawsuit against the Kryptos Group under the DMCA, claiming that their IP has now been stolen.

In Soviet Russia, KGB doesn't enforce the DMCA!

From the article

[Faust7]

the decade-old Cyrillic Projector Code has been cracked, and that it deciphers to some classified KGB instructions and correspondence.

Thank goodness for that decade-old KGB info. The Cold War will be ours!

Actual translation

[mental_telepathy]

The decrypted first part is a Russian text encouraging secret agents to psychologically control potential sources of information.

The actual translation is:
Keep information away from Moose and Squirrel.

Part 5 of the code is even harder

[Anonymous Coward]

I hvae a wnodreulfly tirvial slooiutn but trhee is not enugoh room in the mgrain of tihs book to dsecbire it.

modern art

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

I've seen this cryptographic art all over in the modern art museums. There're paintings, statues, you name it. You can look at them for hours and still not know what the hell they are.

Cyrillic Projector Code...

[ScuzzyTerminator]

Isn't that what SCO uses for it's code presentations?

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!

Rubber Hose Cryptography

[Damiano]

Actually this is a real technique. It's called "Rubber Hose Cryptography". A few hours beating someone with a rubber hose can be considerably more effective at cracking keys than a supercomputer.

Damiano