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CIA Sculpture Code Partially Cracked
A reader wrote in with tidbit about the encrypted sculpture at the CIA's headquarters. One of their analysts, on his own time, after nine years has partially cracked it. I like cool art.
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We don't know nothing about the crypto. Looks like an old style permutations stuff (50-60ish). Well, now we know what do CIA guys do when they are bored.
The right side looks like the key to some letter shift encrpytion. If you look down the left side of the code, the alphabet is listed with the second letter correspondence and no repetition.
However, tried it on the left side text and didn't produce any thing meaningful.
The portion which Stein has been unable to decode yet, was done with a one time pad.
Exactly what I was thinking. Therefore, if you do somehow crack this, you're wise to keep it to yourself. Otherwise, you may find yourself stalked by a Baldwin brother.
I wonder if the top part is a clue to the bottom part, maybe a clue to the square on the right side. Thus, solve the weird, cryptic clue, and find the answer to the bottom.
The OSS. Office of...Secure Service?
Office of Strategic Services.
I can crack that in a few minutes. It looks like it's made of stone.... all I need is a 1 MhZ sledge hammer ;-)
We have to crack the recipe before it kills again! The fate of Belgium -- nay, all Europe -- hangs in the balance! Only the CIA anti-venom will make Europe's foodstuffs safe again.
[Okay, no more international news for me today.]
>Nostradamous predidcted World War III would probably start in July 1999.
Die with your boots on, by Iron Maiden
(off the Piece of Mind album)
Another Prophet of Disaster Who says the ship is lost, Another Prophet of Disaster
Leaving you to count the cost. Taunting us with Visions, Afflicting us with fear,
Predicting War for millions, In the hope that one appears.
No point asking when it is, No point asking who's to go,
No point asking what's the game, No point asking who's to blame.
'cos if you're gonna die, if you're gonna die,
'cos if you're gonna die, if you're gonna die,
If you're gonna die, die with your boots on.
If you're gonna try, just stick around, Gonna cry, just move along,
If you're gonna die, you're gonna die. In 13 the Beast is rising,
The Frenchman did surmise, Through earthquakes and starvation,
The warlord will arise. Terror, Death, Destruction, Pour from the Eastern Sands,
But the truth of all predictions, Is always in your hands.
If you're gonna die, die with your boots on,
If you're gonna try, just stick around, Gonna cry, just move along,
If you're gonna die, you're gonna die.
Screw decoding it, get the source...
i bet that artist will tell you in a split second if you point a gun to his head.
(Chicago, Chicago, my kind of town... )
Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine.
The information says,
Good luck to any Slashdotters who try.
It's "kryptos," and the alphabet with those letters moved to then end.
heh. I'm guessing that, if they really wanted to crack it with their own hardware, they could do it within a matter of minutes, if not seconds...
Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
I wonder how many people, "on their own time", have used the CIA's massive computing resources to crack the code, and then having read the decoded text, have decided not to reveal what it says?
:) "
I mean -- with those kinds of resources, would you really be able to resist finding out what it says?
Perhaps the undecoded part says "Congratulations, now don't tell.
--
Scryer said:
Well, from what I've been able to find out, yes, it may be in a CIA parking lot. However, it is in Virginia rather than in Maryland. ;)
For those who are interested in seeing for yourself where it is, I've got maps from various online map services and posted the lot of them here. Have fun ;)
A quickie check of the USGS's mapping sites reveals that the magic spot isn't quite in Langley, and doesn't even seem to be near any roads. I've got GIFs saved of the finest grain info I could get without paying cash to the USGS; I'll prolly forward them either to the folks doing the crypto breaking or put them on a website somewhere.
Also, yes, they probably DID use the magnetic field to hide it. Specifically, a compass. :) The only USGS maps available of that fine grain are typically topographic maps used by hikers and engineers, or county maps. Most of the topo maps also have magnetic declination marked (how far off magnetic north is from real north) because they're meant for use with a compass and landmarks.
Of interest to those searching--the magic spot seems to be located in Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC along the Virginia/Maryland border. For those ordering maps, the Washington West or Falls Church maps seem to be best bets for finding general area.
I'll also see what other stuff I can dig up with various mapping sites on the net, too (to get road names and whatnot).
As for the bits on getting rid of debris and hiding it underground...that sounds suspiciously to me like it could have been hidden in a cave or possibly an abandoned mine (yes, abandoned mines are fairly common in this part of the country). I wouldn't be at all shocked to see that the key was hidden in a mineshaft...
Good luck!
June 16, 1999
- --- - ---
The Kryptos Code Unmasked
Here are the first three passages of the code on the Kryptos statue as
deciphered by Jim Gillogly, including misspellings (of "illusion," "underground"
and "desperately"). The second passage identifies a location near the C.I.A.
headquarters; the third is taken from Howard Carter's account of the opening of
King Tut's tomb in 1922.
-----------------------------------------------
Related Article
C.I.A.'s Artistic Enigma Yields All but Final Clue
(June 16, 1999)
-----------------------------------------------
1. Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.
2. It was totally invisible.
How's that possible? They used the earth's magnetic field. x The information was
gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown location. x Does Langley know
about this? They should: it's buried out there somewhere. x Who knows the exact
location? Only WW. This was his last message. x Thirty-eight degrees fifty-seven
minutes six point five seconds north, seventy-seven degrees eight minutes
forty-four seconds west. ID by rows.
3. Slowly, desparatly slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the
lower part of the doorway was removed.
With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. And
then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot
air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details
of the room within emerged from the mist. x Can you see anything?
The NSA probably solved this one back in the 60's, and are laughing their asses off now.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
At first, I could not tell if someone took a sledge hammer to the sculpture.
As far as I understand the text decrypted so far, it encourages the decryptor of parts 1-3 to go to the specified location and dig there. The reference to the opening of the grave in Egypt is a dead giveaway. I suspect there will be some part of the code necessary for part 4 buried there.
did anyone else see the word "krypto" on the right side???
Global warming is good for you!
Jim has cracked it to the same extent as Stein; we've been discussing it on the Voynich manuscript mailing list (now there's a cipher worthy of attention). Apparently, the first two sections are like a simple Quagmire III cipher (i.e. a Vigenere cipher with keyed alphabets). It's more difficult that normal because the two sections have different periods, and are run together with no seperator.
At least Jim Gillogly claims to have cracked it. See the "KRYPTOS" thread in news:sci.crypt. This article announces the break. This one mentions an NY Times article (no URL). He says he plans to publish the solution in The Cryptogram, the journal of The American Cryptogram Association
rant
This was recently added to the ABC News Website at the bottom..
Hint of the day:
"Kryptos" Completed Plaintext. Top Half.
Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of illusion. They used the earth's
magnetic field. The information was gathered and
transmitted underground to an unknown location.
That darn Slashdot is so cool... Hey did you pay the phone *(#(Q%$#$ NO CARRIER
This is an interesting link. It may provide some insight into the solution? .
That darn Slashdot is so cool... Hey did you pay the phone *(#(Q%$#$ NO CARRIER
This was recently added to the ABC News Website at the bottom..
Hint of the day:
"Kryptos" Completed Plaintext. Top Half.
Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of illusion. They used the earth's
magnetic field. The information was gathered and
transmitted underground to an unknown location.
The Last 97 Chars:
OBKR
UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO
TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP
TTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR
.
.
That darn Slashdot is so cool... Hey did you pay the phone *(#(Q%$#$ NO CARRIER
I hope no one tries to export this. Terrorists and child pornographers may use this piece of art to kill us all.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Maybe it was developed by Krusty's Krypto Kompany or something.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The real problem here, of course, is that if that's what they did, the message is unbreakable. Any plaintext message is as likely as any other message. Given any plaintext, and the "abcd...kryptos...etc" pattern that I want it to end up as, all I need to do is subtract the plaintext from the final pattern, and I have my one-time pad key.
Now that seems kind of unfair, if it was intended to be a puzzle to solve, so perhaps there's a clue embedded in the plaintext of the first section. Or maybe it's just designed to LOOK like that's the way they did it. :-)
----------------------
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Why not go straight for the safe to find the message? Isn't this how many codes are cracked?
Then we can use the computations cycles for other things....
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
It's a cookbook!
A cookbook!
--
--
The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
Looks sorta like just the alphabet over and over.
-bp
bp
The CIA and it's predecessor organization (the name of which I forget) do most of the wartime decryption, as well as decrypting any encrypted messages their field agents snare, so it's perfectly appropriate where it is.
Now, whether or not the NSA should have its own statue, is another question. Actually, sources inform me that they d- {{{p{p{prSAOD"
NO CARRIER
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Whatever the cypher is it can't be to simple of someone would have broken it by now, that almost certainly rules out any cyphers with operating on individual characters.
The lines themselves are not all the same length (which I would expect means that the block length
the lines are not all of equal length and given the size of the variance it looks like there isn't going to be a common factor of the line lengths apart from one which I imagine means that each line is not a block to itself (see above)
I'd also be suprised if part of one of the blocks was a key if only part of the message had been cracked. If the key was available then all that would be needed is to find the right cypher.
So what does this leave? well I don't know, I enjoy tinkering with crypto but I'm no expert - I'd guess that there must be some form of stream element to whatevers been used.
I think if I speculate any more I'll just make a fool of myself infront of others who do this sort of thing more seriously.
Tom
(free reg. required, of course)
Also has a link to the full text so far. Pretty interesting....
--
Ce qui est n'est pas clos, du point de vue le plus essentiel.
..!!in an intastella burst i am back to save the universe!!
Uh oh it's out of the bag. I put that thing there years ago. There's really no secret code to it, I just made the whole gibberish up just to win a college art contest...go figure.
Just a thought
Regards, tEtra
I hope your not mentioning another organization
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Uh, stupid question, but wouldn't this sort of sculpture be more appropriately placed at the entrance of the NSA?
Alright Slashheads, let's show the CIA what we can do. I'm guessing the left side is the message, and the right side is a key of some sort. Anyone want to guess what the encryption method is? I want to see slashdot break the code! (no computer intervention, please)
I'm surprised no-one's picked up on it, but I really wonder if those mis-spellings *are* mis-spellings or merely a clue to be used in the final paragraph...
It looks like a lot of effort has gone into this - I'm not sure the creator would make mistakes like that without a reason...
Not if the key is shorter than the plaintext, and therefore had to be used more than once. If the key is shorter than the text, the cyphertext becomes possible to break. (Not that I know how.)
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Of course! The mystery 97 letters are just an anagram for:
Grrr! vow blob knob box GHQ puffs quill.
Where do we send this? Do I win money?
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Or at least in part -- looks like the anagram generator just grokked the
OBKR UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNG
part. STILL, we are provided now with vital clues. Someone growling, and the vows of a mysterious quill-smoking blob.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
I would love to be able to put my CPU idle time to working on this one.
What do you mean trout doesn't make good underwear?
This Website has a bunch of information on the code, including a picture and a detailed description of it from the CIA.
if it is encoded with a one time pad, it'd probably be easier to break into the safe in CIA headquarters that contains the results than to crack the crypto.
+++++
+++++
The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
Asking for no computer intervention is missing the point -- unless you know and understand the encryption algorithm you can't brute force attack it.
If any slashdotters are attempting this, they'd better look at the text file here which shows how far people have got already.
They suspect the message is broken into a number of chunks, which appear to have been encrypted several different ways. They think that the last chunk of the message is encrypted with some kind of one time pad system, meaning the key is the same length as that section of text.
If you want to guess the key then be my guest, but it really would be smarter to try an intelligent attack involving all tools available to you -- computers and wits included.
+++++
+++++
The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
This looks like a Vigenere Cipher...
r yptogram8.html
/.
I know they are very weak ciphers but it still looks familiar...
Here... link away
http://www.achiever.com/freehm pg/cryptology/vig.html
http://www.cs.arizona.edu/h ttp/html/people/muth/Cipher/
http://cw.oaktree.co.uk/crypt/vigen ere_doc.html
http://sh akti.trincoll.edu/~rmorelli/FYSM122/Cryptograms/C
--
Bun-Bun Rules!
90% of day read
--
Bun-Bun Rules!
90% of day read
10% of
probably after the aldridge ames mess - I bet that they could tell you all you want to know about what's inside that safe........
said the former CIA director (according to the NY Times article). Also, he said he had "zero memory of it" So the discovery of what the last 97 letters should not be _that_ interesting to obsess about. So the allusion is to a riddle.
Niether the NY times nor the abc news site mention the morse code characters on the concrete (or is it granite?) blocks next to (near?? I guess)to the sculpture. The question is - what is their position and possible relevance to the sculpture?
Man, I'd give you a +5 for that one. For those who don't know, you should see the movie 'A Christmas Story'
You guys are on par with Pat Robertson and his wile-eyed millenium theories....wow, do I sense a huge amount of sarcasm or delusional ramblings??
Doesn't this sound a little like the film "Mercury Rising", where a supersafe algorith is released as a simple puzzle, and a yough kid actually cracks it?
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
The near decryption of this message comes as no surprise to me and many others, given the timing. The message encyrpted within the sculpture will be in itself a mystery. It won't make sense and will sound more like a bunch of artistic, mystical jargon with no purpose other than entertainment.
The truth about this sculpture, however, goes deeper than a simple puzzle. This sculpture is the creation of a secret underground organization, spanning multiple governments and religeous institutions. The future has become quite clear to them. World War III is imminent. The antichrist has been located in Egypt. It shall be noted that Nostradamous predicted in the 16th century that the Antichrist would be a man presently living in the Middle East, and educated in Egypt. The opening sentence of the message in the sculpture describes the opening of an ancient egyptian grave. This organization has been secretly planning their part in World War III over the past 10 years. It is unknown to me what their motives are.
Nostradamous predidcted World War III would probably start in July 1999. The people who are decrypted the sculpture do not know about any of this. Are being used as tools. Once the message has been completly decrypted, it will signify the begining of the third and last World-Wide War.
It seems odd that there has been no speculation here or on the ABCNews forum of the importance of the last 4 columns of the right side... It may make sense that the first 27 columns form a Vigniere grid 26*26 square, plus top header, side header (as indicated by a number of people). But what about the other 4...
;-)...
What have we got in these 4 columns... Excluding the header (ABCD), we have 26 rows of 4, or 104 characters. If we accept the suggestion (ostensibly from the CIA) that the last 97 characters of te left side are encrypted using a one time pad that is the Vigniere square, we still need a key (presumably one letter for each letter to decrypt). Do the last 4 columns of the right side provide this key?
Consider that the word KRYPTOS has 7 characters, the message we're trying to decrypt has 97, and the block we're looking at has 104...
Just a naive attempt at a guess at a starting point
From what the FBI stated in a story not to long ago. The FBI should demand that they have the key so that they can make sure that this is not some sort of criminal activity going on here. You know they don't trust the CIA. Maybe this is some kind of secret message to disclose nuclear secrets to China? Maybe it is child pornography?
:)
Remember, you can't trust anyone!
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
Okay... so how do you decrypt something with a one time pad IF YOU DONT HAVE THE FRIGGING LETTERS? If you do read the decrypted stuff its weird....
One day in the future a bunch of geeks will decrypt this message using a beowulf cluster after they all get too drunk to finish a Quake tourney......
Just an interesting little side note I just figured out, the number of columns with the same length makes a nice little bell curve.
1 row of 29 letters
5 rows of 30 letters
15 rows of 31 letters
5 rows of 32 letters
1 row of 33 letters
Probably doesn't mean anything though.
The one-time pad has to be as long as the encrypted message. So that's not a possibility. The last part has 81 characters.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Actually, my theory, and I don't know if it's naive or besides the point... It seems likely that the last portion was encrypted by a one-time pad, at least according to Kryptos. As we know, a one-time pad is unbreakable if the sequence of characters is truly random.
I don't think the artist meant for the cipher to be unbreakable. That means using a truly unbreakable cipher would be besides the point. So, we are left with two theories:
1) The one-time pad used is not truly random, and understanding the pseudo-randomness of the sequence is part of the deal. My guess is, the one-time pad used was something like an encoded message. Perhaps even a previous part of the encoded message?
2) (More plausible, but less interesting) The one-time pad is actually buried at the coordinates specified in the first parts. Has anyone tried to dig there?
Anyway, I bet this is one of those things that'll basically say something inane like, 'Congratulations! You broke the code.' Hey, there's a few crib ideas...
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
The "digraphic" part is wrong -- that's like a
Playfair, and there was on digraphic system in
the three parts so far decrypted. The first two
are polyalphabetic with keyed ciphertext and
plaintext alphabets, and the third is a triple
complete columnar transposition, with different
periods than the guess in that document.
I'm hopeful that the last section is OTP.
Perhaps Running Key, which is like OTP except that
it has a coherent non-repeating key... and there's
a chance that the coherence would be solvable. It
could also be other stuff, of course, like an
autokey or a combination polyalphabetic and
transposition.
Keep plugging...
Oops, I meant "hopeful that the last section is
NOT OTP."
The sculptor, Jim Sanborn, wrote that he had
given the "keys" to the cipher in a sealed
envelope to the DCI, so that he could easily
decrypt it all. While one put a OTP
key in there, what would be the point?