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Sculptor Gives a Hint For CIA's Kryptos
omega_cubed writes "The New York Times reports that Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created the wavy metal pane called Kryptos that sits in front of the CIA in Langley, VA, has gotten tired of waiting for code-breakers to decode the last of the four messages. 'I assumed the code would be cracked in a fairly short time,' [Sanborn] said, adding that the intrusions on his life from people who think they have solved his fourth puzzle are more than he expected. So now, after 20 years, Mr. Sanborn is nudging the process along. He has provided The New York Times with the answers to six letters in the sculpture's final passage. The characters that are the 64th through 69th in the final series on the sculpture read NYPVTT. When deciphered, they read BERLIN."
All this time I thought it said "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
Oh, I see some may have to play this "game" with the NYT's URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/20/us/code.html?ref=us
Add '&r=2' to the end of the URL.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
At least, that's what I'd guess from how excited you sound about it. Congratulations, kiddo! Hope it was good for both of you.
Just a thought though, but I'm not entirely sure Slashdot is the best venue for bragging about it. A good chunk of us are old enough to have found out what sex produces (i.e. children), another chunk of us are (contrary to stereotypes) actually female, and some more of us have no idea what this "fucking" is all about anyway. Perhaps your friends would be more appreciative? Assuming you have any, of course, what with posting as an AC on Slashdot to give the world the news...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
If you do, the[NO CARRIER]
They aren't code crackers. That's the NSA's job. The CIA assassinates people, and uses very expensive satellites to watch weenie-roasts in countries you can't pronounce, which are started with very large heavy metal cans and ended very suddenly with a bang and a cheer. They also made the CIA World Factbook... which in my humble opinion may be the only thing they've done for the internet that was useful.
So lay off on them being given a really complex soduku in their backyard and then being upset because they didn't have time to screw with it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"Why hasn't anyone solved my one-time pad encrypted puzzle?"
"Ich bin ein Berliner"
Not to say that the geeks don't geek, but c'mon... what intrusions? My guess: he just wanted someone to care again.
Good karma is like social intolerance; apparently everyone has it but me.
When deciphered, they read BERLIN.
"Ich bin ein Berliner!"
In Soviet East Berlin, Erich Honecker eats your jelly doughnut!"
And James Jesus Angelton provided the orchids from his private garden. I am still kicking myself for not attending a book signing session by Markus Wolf, that took place near where I live . . . hell, then I could claim, "I saw the face, of the man without a face!"
A real cryptographer would have written something on the side of his notes saying, "Oh, I have found a really simple solution for this cipher, but I don't have enough room to prove it here. Get back to ya' later on that!"
Meanwhile, poor Günter Schabowski, couldn't decipher the notes from the East German Politburo, and inadvertently opened up the Berlin Wall.
Those politicians and spies say the darnedest things . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
There's no crypto behind this guess. Just a leap of intuition from a reference to Webster to King Tut. And the fact that Cohen's First We Take Manhattan was published in 1988, which would have been current around the time the puzzle was being designed for construction in 1990. And the first line of second verse would be a pretty neat thing to slip into a puzzle like this.
123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123BERLIN012345678
theysentencedmeto20yearsofboredomfirstwetakemanhattanthenwetakeBERLIN
There's just a few dozen big problems with this sort of guessing. First, second, third, and fourth, I'm cheating. I used the first line and the last line of the first verse in order to make it fit. I'm really cheating, since you don't have digits in the solution set, and would have to encode "20" as "XX" in Roman numerals. And knowing all this, I still felt a flash of "WOW" as I measured the characters. Funny thing how the brain works.
That's the fun part about conspiracy theories - you can be completely wrong (the words don't line up!), you can be completely wrong (the words line up just fine if you pick the right lines, except you can't put digits in the message...), you can be completely wrong (fine, replace "20" with roman numerals!), and eventually (I'm sure if I'd been off by one character, I'd have said "start at zero", but I didn't have to for purposes of this post), you'll find a solution that fits.
What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.
But it was a fun diversion for a Saturday evening. Given that a material chunk of the plaintext has been disclosed, and that we can now assume the plaintext to be in English, I'm looking forward to the real solution in a few months.
There are no shortcuts, and good luck to those in the business who actually know what they're doing: starting with the math, and let the solution reveal itself.
N = B
Y = E
P = R
V = L
T = I
T = N (if it's preceded by another 'T'),
It shouldn't take too long to solve now.
Seems to me that if someone developed some combination of algorithms, mathematics, novel distributed processing techniques, or hardware that could easily crack public crypto challenges, and posted the results to claim credit, s/he might get attention beyond the "attaboy/girl, come work for us" kind. There could be consequences.
You'd think that with people from the CIA and NSA - they'd be able crack these things with their eyes closed.
It doesn't give me a lot of confidence that the government could crack anything strong than the ciphers encoded by a Capt'n Crunch decoder wheel...
Furthermore - any time someone claimed to have decoded a section of it - the NSA and/or CIA would claim that they had already figured it out...RIIIIIGHT...
FWIW, my high school German teacher was a teenager in Germany at the time, and her grandmother scolded her severely for busting a gut laughing at Kennedy when he uttered this line. And just to be clear, she comes from an old Prussian family -- this was not a case of an American military family having one over on their president. While folks in Berlin might not have made much of the turn of phrase, folks elsewhere in Germany, at least some of them, had a grand old time.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I remember a night we walked along the Seine riding on the metro
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
William H. Webster owes me $20. I TOLD him it was the lyrics to "Take My Breath Away"!
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
The artist is a stroke.
I'm not familiar with Kryptos, and I'm not one for cryptography. We know there are (at least) two layers here, the encryption and the resulting riddle. Obviously Sanborn is being coy.
The word IQLUSION stood out to me. At face value this seems to be a misspelling of illusion, but also obvious is the beginning IQ: intelligence quotient. If that is abbreviated to intelligence, and you read through the rest, you get intelligence illusion. Perhaps a reference to counter-intelligence? This is Langley, after all.
Maybe this is old news, or nothing, or part of the second layer riddle. Just something I thought of after a few minutes. I didn't have any insight about UNDERGRUUND, though.
Ironically, this is actually the message encoded in Kryptos.
First we take Manhattan
Then we take Berlin!
(Kick-ass song, btw.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
38.9518056N, 77.1455556W
-or- 38 57' 6.5"N, 77 8' 44"W
(+38 57' 6.50", -77 8' 44.00")
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=104463936351270454677.00049586da73dc035492f&ll=38.952071,-77.145732&spn=0.000743,0.001695&t=h&z=20
-- BearGriz72
IT'S A COOKBOOK!!
i just fucked a girl in her pussy! more than you loser-ass fucking neckbeards will ever do.
She's your mother AND your lover!
And they all have code breakers, this includes the CIA and FBI.
From Wikipedia:
Krypton is inert for most practical purposes. Krypton can also form clathrates with water when atoms of it are trapped in a lattice of the water molecules.
------
The water in front of the sculpture is showing that the final part is a Lattice-based cryptosystem...
Just my two cents...
No, that's clearly not right, see:
I just fucked a girl in her pussy! more than you loser-ass fuckBERLINckbeards will ever do.
get some sunlight you stupid fuckers!! hahahaha
Go back to cryptanalysis school, n00b.
That's not the least bit helpful. Everyone knew those letters were Berlin. If only he had told us whether it is Irving, East, or New Hampshire.
On the first point, might I suggest looking at the posting histories of Slashdot users such as Macgrrl, AriaStar, xirusmom, and girlintraining, among other possibilities (though admittedly the username "girlintraining" might suggest someone not born to femininity; I'm honestly not sure).
On the second point, may I direct your attention to this most informative link, as requested. ;)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Well, if nothing else, thank you for the tour through Cold War spymasters. Schabowski deserves a dozen medals for what he did for humanity, even if it was inadvertent.
So Solution 2 gives some coordinates that identify a point near the sculpture, yet I can't find any mention of anyone taking a shovel to that location.
Has anyone been out there rooting around in the dirt?
The answer has to be a blindingly obvious "yes", but the internet fails to give me that answer...
Sorry, we're all too busy getting paid 6 figures to write Perl scripts to scan your SIGINT networks for insecure services, bypassing your IDSs/IPSs and attempting to try default passwords on behalf of foreign governments or 'private organisations' to do your stupid puzzle.
Nothing sad about this. It just illustrates that cryptanalysis is very hard when there's not enough context.
Not only that, but there's little incentive to solve these cyphers. It's not like he's hiding a Swiss bank account or ICBM launch codes.
The best a cracker could expect would be some kudos and maybe a job offer.
Not something anyone is going to spend supercomputer time on or build a botnet to crack.
Just a friendly reminder to potential mods out there:
Treatment of the absurd as if it were rational is one of the many devices used by comedic practitioners to create their comedy, particularly that of the self-deprecating variety. Furthermore, regarding a person's sense of humor, Wikipedia has the following to say:
People of all ages and cultures respond to humour. The majority of people are able to experience humour, i.e., to be amused, to laugh or smile at something funny, and thus they are considered to have a sense of humour. The hypothetical person lacking a sense of humour would likely find the behaviour induced by humour to be inexplicable, strange, or even irrational, and would probably consider it trolling (I added that part)
In other words, there's no -1 mod for "I don't get the joke". Thanks for your time.
"First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"
The guy is a cryptographer... I'd consider "Berlin" as being both a clue *and* a misdirection.
The message might well read something like : rememBER LINcoln's birthplace...
They need to maintain a facade of incompetence so their opponents will continue to underestimate them.
I just have to say, shouldn't the CIA be just a tad bit embarrassed that they can't crack a piece of artwork that they commissioned and sits right in their own damn courtyard?
by the way, i didnt see it mentioned anywhere and although it is not relevant, the cia guy who helped the artist, owns the company that sued microsoft for using encryption and settled. he now is suing sun, oracle, eBay any anyone else who use encryption. as accomplished in cryptography as he obviously is, his cryptography company, TecSec, couldnt make a dime without patent trolling.
And, alas, my "on the second point" link was an extension of your joke. Dry humour so seldom finds a truly appreciative audience these days...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
No, the rest of the message is "It's goin' down, y'all - like the wall of Berlin". Cleverly, the entire ciphertext is also the proper pronunciation Prince's old glyph.
This guy saved the world and ought to get a medal or two.
After working nonstop since the hint was published, I was able to decode the entire fourth message.
Unfortunately, it's written in all caps and has no spaces, so the Slashdot filters will not allow me to post it.
The fact that the clue had to be "leaked" to the intelligence(?) community, truly seems apropos.
Wh*n will th*s* p*opl* g*t a clu*?
Leaked hint: It's a vowel, not a, not i, not o, not u, and not sometimes y.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
One might argue that 'funny' is in the eye of the beholder. To be more concrete, if you attempt to make a funny post, and your post gets more mods down than it gets '+1 Funny', then obviously the majority of the audience was not amused and you failed to be funny in the context of that audience, that is, it wasn't funny.
While treatment of the absurd as if it were rational is indeed one of the devices used by comedic practitioners to create comedy, that doesn't automatically make all instances of doing so funny.
I did it! First we take Man[NO CARRIER]
it's not in front of the CIA it's in a courtyard
I suppose you're right in that I shouldn't lecture people about what they ought to find funny. I was just frustrated that some people would interpret my comment as hate-speech rather than simply being a bad joke.
Ironically, at the time of this writing, my original comment has received just one "-1 Troll" mod, followed by three "+1 Funny" mods. I'm not quite sure what to make of that...*ugh* I really just want this thread to be over.