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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."
If you do, the[NO CARRIER]
"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.
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.
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.
The US government used to work hard to keep the NSA out of the public eye. Though the existence of the organization wasn't a total secret, press coverage wasn't welcome at all until after September 11. I remember when I arrived at Defense Language Institute in late 1999 as a fresh Navy recruit, some among my supervisors, old hands in SIGINT and some of whom had served at Ft. Mead itself, were very upset at the recent Baltimore Sun coverage of DLI and the NSA. "The public doesn't need to know any of what we do."
Also, the CIA's spies had to use encryption. Their lives depended on it, and the organization grew out of earlier military units concerned with cryptography and codebreaking.
So when it came to putting up a monument like this, one that would attract the public to figure out its secrets, better to put it outside the CIA's headquarters, because by this point the existence and general purpose of the CIA was known to everyone.
Nothing sad about this. It just illustrates that cryptanalysis is very hard when there's not enough context.
In other words, you too can keep your messages secret for 20 years if you (1) keep your messages short and seemingly random, and (2) don't reuse the same cypher.
The three letter agencies have a better chance of decoding the Voynich manuscript than this statue, simply because there's more to analyze in the manuscript.
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.
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
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.
Well, I did the only sensible thing and entered it into WolframAlpha for analysis. So, at this point, I have determined that "fucking" is a very colloquial, informal intensifier with a Scrabble score of 17 that corresponds to the telephone keypad digits, 382-5464. I give up.
Ha, that was a pretty elegant way to say "tits or gtfo."
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...
Not just better, but also more appropriate. The NSA and its purposes have been corrupted; best that it go away entirely.
And the CIA is a factory which produces rainbows and puppies?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A large part of the problem is that the sculptor wasn't meticulous enough, and introduced _errors_ to the cyphertexts. That makes the decryption all the more complicated, because you have to brute-force all the possible errors he could have made and try each of them against your proposed solution. For a linear encryption scheme, you can find out where the errors are and cut down on the time, but for a matrix type encryption, even if you had the key and the cipher, you will get gibberish out with a single typo or left out character.
Nope. The greatest fool can ask a question that the wisest man cannot answer.
It's incredible easy to make a cipher so convulated and impractical (e.g. encode by the phase of the moon determined by the fourteenth character, then transpose all vowels, add up the number of strokes within each letter using the Arial font, multiply those numbers by the number 10 places ahead of it, then look those up on a ceasar cipher) that it's boring and uninteresting to decipher it and pretty much "impossible". Unfortunately, it also becomes incredibly useless as a cipher then because it becomes tedious to communicate using it, and the security of a cipher has nothing to do with its difficulty of encryption or decryption procedure - you'll probably find that a couple of supercomputers could find enough patterns in the above "cipher" that they could find the right answers without having to even KNOW the phase of the moon.
The thing about mathematical ciphers is that the method is public and yet they are still incredibly difficult to decrypt. This isn't an interesting cipher, mathematically speaking, because the method is closed so it could be anything. All we have is some jumbled text and (presumably) a sensible answer that we're not privy to. It's more a children's puzzle than a cipher, just a very difficult one - because nobody actually uses this cipher to communicate (so the cipher can be unnecessarily complicated without actually being *secure*, the plaintext could well be complete junk, the message may even be erroneously encoded, and there's only a single - non-militarily-important - instance of an encoded text).
In short - nobody cares. It's like the book-competitions where someone buries treasure and publishes a book which "gives the details" of where it's buried. It's pretty much chance if you find it or not because there is no requirement for the answer to be logical, practical or even decryptable. The one I saw, you had to draw a line from the eye of a character on each artwork-strewn page, through their index finger, to a particular letter in a word on the outside of the page border, then interpret those clues which narrowed things down to an entire field somewhere in the UK - the "winner" was the author's former-flatmate's girlfriend.
The importance of a ciphered message is more related to its origin, the probability of it being an unintentional leak, the probability of it being militarily important, and other non-mathematical factors. Then, if you have the impetus, running it through a supercomputer with what little you know or (infinitely better) getting a couple more messages that use the same scheme and are likely to reveal commonalities. That's how we beat Engima. This is just a puzzle-book, and quite boring because it can actually just be gibberish and nobody would really care.
dead puppies and rainbow-colored gut piles, yes
This is the same reason Lost appealed to the masses, but not the thinking folk -- if you can throw arbitrary impossible bullshit in to "explain" something, it's not really an explanation. It became more like a bunch of kids playing Cops and Robbers with the one kid who decides he's got an alien spacecraft with a freeze ray that he can use at any point to immobilize his enemies. Call it a black swan if you want, but it certainly affects how interesting a story is.