Slashdot Mirror
Decrypting Kryptos
angkor writes "Kryptos is a sculpture located on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Installed in 1990, its thousands of characters contain encrypted messages, of which three have been solved (so far). There is still a fourth section at the bottom consisting of 97 or 98 characters which remains uncracked."
Dynamite oughtta crack it...
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
"Stop goofing off. Get back to work"
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Superman must be shaking in his boots right about now.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Forgive me for being cynical, but how can we be sure that this final piece is actually crackable? I mean, it would be a cruel joke by Jim Sanborn (the structure's creator) to just include a load of junk, but who's to say he didn't? The fact that the other parts have been deciphered suggests that this last part will give way eventually, but maybe that's just to make the final joke even crueler?
I hope I'm wrong because that would make this story a lot less interesting, but I just thought it should be mentioned.
apterous.org
If you can't tell how many characters it has, no wonder it's so hard to crack.
"We are"..."
There's more! "s", "o", "r", "r", "y"
"We are sorry"...We knew this!
"f", "p", "r" - "We are sorry for" - "t", "h", "e", - "We are sorry for the what!?!
"i", "n", "c", "o", "n", "v", "e", - almost got it - "n", "i", "e", "n", "c" "e".
"We are sorry for the inconvenience"? You bastard!!
*Apologies to DNA, who orignially used this idea as God's final message to the univers.
It depends on the code. Often it involves looking for patterns, knowledge of letter frequencies, a bit of luck, and a while lot of skill. It helps if you know the type of cryptography being used. For example, if there is a known algorithm being used, such as RSA, one can do a brute force attack and test every possible decryption key (a very computationally intensive task, but feasable for small, older keys). Since many codes are based upon "hard math problems" such as RSA whose security is derived from the fact that it is easy to multiply prime numbers, but hard to factor composite numbers into primes, some codes are broken by find fast solutions to hard math problems. This is kind of the idea behind Shor's Quantum Computer algorithm which allows one to quickly factor large integers and thus could, if implemented, completely screw over RSA.
where that's kid from mercury rising when you need him.
Runnin' On Empty
Be Sure to drink your Ovaltine.
As a wonderful sci-fi connection, I suggest reading Cryptonomicron, by Neal Stephenson. Besides providing an excellent story (like all his books), it provides an extensive discussion of how code-breaking works, and how historically it evolved.
"Stumble before you crawl"
There's a classic book on the history of codes and codebreaking called The Codebreakers, by David Kahn. A revised edition came out recently. There is even a Wikipedia article about him.
Technically, I think its "News for nerds, Stuff that was posted on Fark.com yesterday", but others may disagree.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
>
AT&ROFLMAO
The people who solved the first 3 are currently in jail for DCMA violations. ;^)
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Someone could've just asked me. I'm not THAT complicated.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
Weird. This guy apparently metaphorically solved section 4. But he got an email from Jim saying "Dear John, this is not the way" Did he cheat? :)
m l
http://members.aol.com/scirealm/KryptosPart4.ht
That is true. This appears to be covered under the DMCA. Unencrypting that last part of a proprietary work will wind you up in jail. Leave it alone for gods sake!!!
A priest, a doctor, and an engineer are playing a round of golf. They get behind a pair that is playing amazingly slow. After some time they realize that these two men are blind. "What a sad way to spend one's life," said the priest. "I will say a prayer for them." "I have a good friend that is an eye surgeon," said the doctor, "maybe I could get them some help." The engineer thought for a second, "Why don't these guys play at night?"
I don't get it though.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
My God it's a cookbook.
From the Slashdot summary:
And from the actual page: So, unless angkor is the author of the page over at elonka.com, he's plagiarised the article for his summary. Now, I understand that this can be a difficult call to make, since the article is clearly cited. However, the language of the summary ("angkor writesSadly, this is not the first time this has ever happened on Slashdot (in fact, it happens in nearly every posted article). Come on, people. If you're going to submit a story, either summarize the article in your own words or attribute your summary text to the article. And editors, pull your thumbs out of your asses and actually edit your site once in a while. In a case like this, it's pretty damned obvious that the article summary is just part of the first paragraph of TFA, and so rather than attributing the summary to the article submitter ("angkor writes ..."), use other language that makes clear the quoting ("angkor quotes from the article ...").
You must not have put in the correct coordinates. In decimal degrees:
-77.1455555555555555 lon
38.95180555555555555 lat
which is a courtyard right smack in the middle of CIA headquarters.
It is interesting to note that Elonka Dunin (one of the most prominent people involved with the cracking of Kryptos and the Cyrillic Projector) put a slashdotting in her timeline of important Kryptos events.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
My girlfriend took one look at it and saw an image embedded in the way the characters are laid out. She figures that a real message would be too obvious and since its art, the real purpose could simply be to see what is not plainly there.
Maybe the boys at Langley are being too literal at trying to solve it.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Christmas should be capitalized.
;-)
What makes you think it isn't?
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
This story is a dupe... The original was posted 5 1/2 years ago. (!) Here's the original story.
Yet he's on Slashdot...
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
. . .
George Smiley,
Asst. Attorney to
Director, National Security Agency
Chief, Central Security Service
(NSA Information Assurance Department)
Date As Decrypt Key
Re: Unauthorized Use and Disclosure of Intellectual Property
VIA FEDERAL EXPRESS
Dear Cryptanalyst,
I serve as legal counsel to the NSA Information Assurance Department, owner of extensive intellectual property rights and trademarks pertaining to the use, distribution and deployment of intelligence worldwide. In fact you may have heard of us. To make you fully understand our concern and the reach of our recognised brands throughout the world, let me put it this way, we do what RIAA only dreams they could.
It has recently come to our attention that John Doe, in personam, i.e. youself, the only possible recipient of this message has sought to circumvent our intentional copy protection of classified communications, thereby exposing our proprietary materials, name, marks, trade dress, intellectual property and good will to possible illegal misuses including but not limited to commercial exploitation or karma whoring on Slashdot.
By reading this message you have violated federal laws, including (among others) the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Economic Espionage Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Wiretap Act, the Legal Lobbyist Retirement Protection Act, and the Consumer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as State of Wisconsin Natalie Portman 3D Redistribution Act (HP Amendment). (We're the NSA, we know about that one too.)
Therefore we require that you immediately CEASE AND DESIST from any and all activities causing, leading to or which might be construed to result in the actual or potential dissemination of the proprietary information and excellent legal drafting contained herin. Under the terms of the DMCA, inter alia, we inform you that henceforth your knowledge of this text will be deemed to be a Circumvention Device, and as such we are required to place restrictions on your person. Kindly call me on the number below and await instructions. Do not move, do not try to escape, do not pass go and do not collect $200 (that's all we have left after spending $20Bln on the Great Monument to ourselves you see before you.)
Failure to comply with these requests may expose you or your organization to an action for injunctive relief or monetary damages, and any other relief permitted under state and federal law, including court costs and attorneys' fees. You may also wish to consider and examine the potential criminal consequences, under theories of aiding and abetting and conspiracy to denigrate the agencies elite avant-garde sculptural skills.
If you fail to comply with these requests we will have to invoke recourse under the Homeland Bitchslap Act of 2001.
Sincerely,
George "W" Smiley.
P.S. Son, you should have just applied through personnel. Way back when I was a junior we dreamed up this sucker distract the Russians who'd waste all their time drinking vodka and analysing it just to get one over us. Don't worry, I'll tell your Ma it was friendly fire.
. . .
.
In the UK at least, an author has stautory provision against false attribution. Fair use itself does not usually take consideration of the effect or intent. No new work was created in which a fair use rule can be applied. The effect is redistribution in a database, for which there is a ton of case law saying the incident is actionable.
Although to go into the grey area here would take too long, the person who "writes" is attributing material to themselves.
Ah, but it's Slashdot who writes "writes". Seriously, if that were my article, even if it is 5 years old, I'd be pretty pissed off at the mere lack of simple tact. A big publisher might see a need to defend their rights even apparently tenuous ones. There is a need for such commercial defences, even if it has all gone mad with the RIAA etc.
So I wonder when we'll see CoyboyNeal writes: "Today we got sued by Reuters, for the full story, please see our forthcoming 404 error
It's stupid to tread on toes. Even more stupid to encourage people to help you to tread on big companies toes.
Oh well, not that anything i said matters or anything . .
Heh. While it is indeed true that I have hidden other codes and puzzles around my webpages, this isn't one of them. ;) As part of the most recent article, the folks at Wired simply made a graphic of my Kryptos transcript page. Any unusual pixels from there, occurred on their end.
:)
Elonka
If only those math nerds could think outside the box like your girlfriend. She's such a lateral thinker. It really is amazing that she figured out the whole puzzle in one glance.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
I got into the project about a year ago, and I can tell you that we (Yahoo Kryptos group) have some brilliant people trying just about everything imaginable. :)
I cant tell you how much time i've spent in the middle of the night arranging the letters in x,y grids... and even more bizzare.
I reconstructed the statue in 3D Studio Max so that i could tinker with the idea of folding the statue on itself, etc. One of the vigenere keywords in an earlier section hints at the reuse of the message, so its just an angle i've been tinkering with.
http://www.storm-seeker.com/kryptos.jpg
If anyone would like a copy of the max files to tinker with, shoot me an email at storPIZZAmseeker@gmail.com minus food