Slashdot Mirror
Another Hint For Kryptos
rastos1 writes Four years ago Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created the wavy metal pane called Kryptos that sits in front of the CIA in Langley revealed a clue for breaking the last remaining part of the encrypted message on Kryptos. The clue was: BERLIN.
But the puzzle resisted all all decryption efforts and is still unsolved.
To honor the 25th anniversary of the Wall's demise and the artist's 69th birthday this year, Sanborn has decided to reveal a new clue to help solve his iconic and enigmatic artwork. It's only the second hint he's released since the sculpture was unveiled in 1990 and may finally help unlock the fourth and final section of the encrypted sculpture, which frustrated sleuths have been struggling to crack for more than two decades. The next word in the sequence is: "clock."
...to drink your Ovaltine".
Because cracking the code is a rewarding achievement unto itself? You sound like a highly unimaginative workaholic who can't comprehend why someone would do something purely for the novelty, entertainment or pure enjoyment of the act itself. To you, everything must have some sort of tangible reward such as a paycheck or prize. I feel sad for you. I mean, why do you bother to live? For what purpose? Clearly you find no satisfaction here, aside from working for a paycheck.
The first fucking sentence was the positive aspect.
"Sanborn also confirmed that should he die before the entire sculpture becomes deciphered, there will be someone able to confirm the solution."
Better known as 318230.
There are lots of pressing problems.
Cyphers, as opposed to codes, have well-defined functions (be it an algorithm or a lookup table) which map the input to the output. The same functions are applied in the same way across the entire input. Unless the functions are such that the output is truly indistinguishable from a random oracle (or, indeed, any other Oracle product), information is exposed, both information about the message and information about the method for producing the cyphertext. Since randomness can tell you nothing, by definition, the amount of information exposed cannot exceed the the information limit proposed by Shannon for a channel whose bandwidth is equal to the non-randomness of the output.
(A channel is a channel is a channel. The rules don't care.)
So, obviously you want to know how to get at the greatest amount of the unencrypted data that's encoded in the non-randomness, and how do you actually then extract the contents?
In other words, is there a general purpose function that can do basic, naive cryptanalysis? And what, exactly, can such a function achieve given a channel of N bits and a message of M bits?
In other words, how much non-randomness can a cypher have before you definitely know there's enough information leakage in some arbitrary cypher for the most naive cryptanalysis possible (excluding brute-force, since that's not analytical and isn't naive since you have to know the cypher) to be able to break the cypher in finite time? (Even if that's longer than the universe is expected to last.)
Is there some function which can take the information leakage rate and the type and complexity of the cypher to produce a half-life of that class of cyphers, where you can expect half of a random selection of cyphers (out of all cyphers with the same characteristics) to be broken at around that estimated half-life point?
If you can do that, then you know how complex you can make your cypher for a competition page, and how simple you can afford it when building a TrueCrypt replacement.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I am a girl, you insensitive clod.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.