Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the four encrypted messages it bears. Of these four messages, the first three have been solved, while the fourth message remains one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world. It is said that a fifth message will reveal itself after the first four are solved. The sculpture continues to be of interest to cryptanalysts, both amateur and professional, who are attempting to decipher the fourth passage. The artist has so far given four clues to this passage.
Description
Close-up view of part of the text
The sculpture comprises four large copper plates with other elements consisting of water, wood, plants, red and green granite, white quartz, and petrified wood. The most prominent feature of the entire part is a large vertical S-shaped copper screen resembling a scroll or a piece of paper emerging from a computer printer, half of which consists of encrypted text, that is located in the northwest corner of the New Headquarters Building courtyard, outside of the agency's cafeteria. The characters are all found within the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, along with question marks, and are cut out of the copper plates. The main sculpture contains four separate enigmatic messages, three of which have been deciphered.[2]
In addition to the main part of the sculpture, Jim Sanborn also placed other pieces of art on the CIA grounds, such as several large granite slabs with sandwiched copper sheets outside the entrance to the New Headquarters Building. Several Morse code messages are found on these copper sheets, and one of the stone slabs has an engraving of a compass rose pointing to a lodestone. The ciphers' increasing "complexity" through the entrance into the courtyard is intended to be as if it "were a fossil".[3] Other elements of Sanborn's installation include a landscaped garden area, a fish pond with opposing wooden benches, a reflecting pool, and other pieces of stone, including a triangle-shaped black stone slab.[1]
The name Kryptos comes from the ancient Greek word for "hidden", and the theme of the sculpture is "intelligence gathering". The cost of building the sculpture in 1988 was US$250,000 (worth ~US$660,000 in 2024).[4]
Encrypted messages
The ciphertext on the left-hand side of the sculpture (as seen from the courtyard) of the main sculpture contains 869 characters in total: 865 letters and 4 question marks. In April 2006, Sanborn released information stating that a letter was omitted from this side of Kryptos "for aesthetic reasons, to keep the sculpture visually balanced".[5] There are also three misspelled words in the plaintext of the deciphered first three passages, which Sanborn has said was intentional,[5] and three letters ("YAR") near the beginning of the bottom half of the left side are the only characters on the sculpture in superscript.
The right-hand side of the sculpture comprises a keyedVigenère encryption tableau, consisting of 867 letters. One of the lines of the Vigenère tableau has an extra character (L). Bauer, Link, and Molle suggest that this may be a reference to the Hill cipher as an encryption method for the fourth passage of the sculpture.[6] However, Sanborn omitted the extra letter from the small Kryptos models that he sold.
Sanborn worked with a retiring CIA employee named Edward Scheidt to come up with the cryptographic systems used on the sculpture.[7] Edward Scheidt stated that the difficulty of the encryption was around nine out of ten. He said that his intention was for it to be solved in five to ten years. He also said that there was an intentional "change in the methodology" of the encryption.[8] Sanborn has also stated that should he die before the entire sculpture is deciphered, someone should be able to confirm the solution.[9] In 2020, Sanborn stated that he planned to put the secret to the solution up for auction once he died.[10]
Sanborn had stated that the sculpture contains a riddle within a riddle, which will be solvable only after the four encrypted passages have been deciphered.[7] He has given conflicting information about the sculpture's answer, saying at one time that he gave the complete solution to the then-CIA director William Webster during the dedication ceremony, but later, he also said that he had not given Webster the entire solution. He did, however, confirm that a passage of the plaintext of the second message reads, "Who knows the exact location? Only WW."[11][b]
Solvers
The first person to announce publicly that he had solved the first three passages was Jim Gillogly, a computer scientist from southern California, who deciphered these passages using a computer, and revealed his solutions in 1999.[12] After Gillogly's announcement, the CIA revealed that their analyst David Stein had solved the same passages in 1998 using pencil and paper techniques, although at the time of his solution the information was only disseminated within the intelligence community.[13][14] No public announcement was made until July 1999,[15][16] although in November 1998 it was revealed that "a CIA analyst working on his own time [had] solved 'the lion's share' of it".[17]
The NSA claimed that some of their employees had solved the same three passages but would not reveal names or dates until March 2000, when it was learned that an NSA team led by Ken Miller, along with Dennis McDaniels and two other unnamed individuals, had solved passages1–3 in late 1992.[18] In 2013, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Elonka Dunin, the NSA released documents that show these attempts to solve the Kryptos puzzle in 1992, following a challenge by Bill Studeman, then Deputy Director of the CIA. The documents show that by June 1993, a small group of NSA cryptanalysts had succeeded in solving the first three passages of the sculpture.[19][20]
All previous attempts to solve Kryptos found that passage 2 ended with "WESTIDBYROWS". However, in 2005, Nicole Friedrich, a logician from Vancouver, Canada, determined that another possible plaintext was "WESTXLAYERTWO".[21] On April 19, 2006, Sanborn contacted an online community dedicated to the Kryptos puzzle to inform them that he made an error in the sculpture by omitting an S in the ciphertext (an X in the plaintext), and he confirmed that the last passage of the plaintext was "WESTXLAYERTWO", and not "WESTIDBYROWS".[22]
Solutions
The following are the decryptions of passages1–3 of the sculpture.[23] The texts were added with blank spaces, but misspellings present in the text are included verbatim.
Morse code
The translations of the International Morse code (sometimes called K0) that are ascribed to the copper slabs when read facing the south:[24][c]
IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE HOWS THAT POSSIBLE? THEY USED THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGRUUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS? THEY SHOULD ITS 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 X LAYER TWO
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 Q?
This is a paraphrased quotation from Howard Carter's account of the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun on November 26, 1922, as described in his 1923 book The Tomb of Tutankhamun.[25][pageneeded] The question with which it ends is asked by Lord Carnarvon, to which Carter in the book replied, "wonderful things". Field notes from the expedition, however, show his reply as, "Yes, it is wonderful".[26][specify]
Clues given for passage4
The Mengenlehreuhr (Berlin Clock) may be the "Berlin Clock" the encrypted message references.
When commenting in 2006 about his error in passage2, Sanborn said that the answers to the first three passages contain clues to the fourth passage.[5] In November 2010, Sanborn released a clue, publicly stating that "NYPVTT", the 64th–69th letters in passage4, become "BERLIN" after decryption.[27][28]
Sanborn gave The New York Times another clue in November 2014: the letters "MZFPK", the 70th–74th letters in passage4, become "CLOCK" after decryption.[29] The 74th letter is K in both the plaintext and ciphertext, meaning that it is possible for a character to encrypt to itself. Sanborn further stated that in order to solve passage4, "You'd better delve into that particular clock", but added, "There are several really interesting clocks in Berlin."[30] The particular clock in question is presumably the Berlin Clock, although the Alexanderplatz World Clock and Clock of Flowing Time are other candidates.[30]
In an article published on January 29, 2020, by The New York Times, Sanborn gave another clue: at positions 26–34, ciphertext "QQPRNGKSS" is the word "NORTHEAST".[10]
In August 2020, Sanborn revealed that the four letters in positions 22–25, ciphertext "FLRV", in the plaintext are "EAST". Sanborn commented that he "released this layout to several people as early as April".[31]
Related sculptures
After producing Kryptos, Sanborn's first cryptographic sculpture, he went on to make several other sculptures with codes, including an "Untitled Kryptos Piece" and Cyrillic Projector, which contain encrypted Russian Cyrillic text that includes an extract from a classified KGB document. The cipher on one side of Sanborn's 1997 sculpture Antipodes repeats part of the text from Kryptos with slight differences.
In popular culture
The dust jacket of the US version of Dan Brown's 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code contains two references to Kryptos—one on the back cover (coordinates printed light red on dark red, vertically next to the blurbs) is a reference to the coordinates mentioned in the plaintext of passage2, except the degree digit is off by one. When Brown and his publisher were asked about this, they both gave the same reply: "The discrepancy is intentional". The coordinates were part of the first clue of the second The Da Vinci Code WebQuests, with the first answer being Kryptos. The other reference is hidden in the brown "tear" artwork—the upside-down text "Only WW knows" is another reference to the second message on Kryptos.[4][32]Kryptos was also featured in another of Dan Brown's novels, The Lost Symbol (2009).[2]
A small version of Kryptos appears in the season 5 episode of Alias "S.O.S.". In it, Marshall Flinkman says he has cracked the code just by looking at it during a tour visit to the CIA office. The solution he describes sounds like the solution to the first two parts. It was also mentioned as "Kryptos Donuts" in the sixth episode of The Recruit's Season 1, "I.N.A.S.I.A.L.".
↑ "WW" has been speculated to be a reference to William Webster.
↑ Sources might write "INTERPRETATIT" as "INTERPRETATIU" or "INTERPRETATIO[N]" due to the presumed dash that is consistent with O in International Morse code. (anonymous) (May 17, 2009). "Kryptos – Beyond K4". Photos by Jim Gillgoly. Morse Code. Archived from the original on December 26, 2015. Retrieved May 6, 2024. And the E after "POSITION" is sometimes not present. Wilson. "Morse Code"(TXT). Contributions by Eric Hall. Archived from the original on May 13, 2023.
Related Research Articles
In cryptography, a cipher is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. To encipher or encode is to convert information into cipher or code. In common parlance, "cipher" is synonymous with "code", as they are both a set of steps that encrypt a message; however, the concepts are distinct in cryptography, especially classical cryptography.
Cryptanalysis refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic security systems and gain access to the contents of encrypted messages, even if the cryptographic key is unknown.
In cryptography, the one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked, but requires the use of a single-use pre-shared key that is larger than or equal to the size of the message being sent. In this technique, a plaintext is paired with a random secret key. Then, each bit or character of the plaintext is encrypted by combining it with the corresponding bit or character from the pad using modular addition.
In cryptography, a transposition cipher is a method of encryption which scrambles the positions of characters (transposition) without changing the characters themselves. Transposition ciphers reorder units of plaintext according to a regular system to produce a ciphertext which is a permutation of the plaintext. They differ from substitution ciphers, which do not change the position of units of plaintext but instead change the units themselves. Despite the difference between transposition and substitution operations, they are often combined, as in historical ciphers like the ADFGVX cipher or complex high-quality encryption methods like the modern Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
In cryptography, the tabula recta is a square table of alphabets, each row of which is made by shifting the previous one to the left. The term was invented by the German author and monk Johannes Trithemius in 1508, and used in his Trithemius cipher.
The Playfair cipher or Playfair square or Wheatstone–Playfair cipher is a manual symmetric encryption technique and was the first literal digram substitution cipher. The scheme was invented in 1854 by Charles Wheatstone, but bears the name of Lord Playfair for promoting its use.
In cryptography, ciphertext or cyphertext is the result of encryption performed on plaintext using an algorithm, called a cipher. Ciphertext is also known as encrypted or encoded information because it contains a form of the original plaintext that is unreadable by a human or computer without the proper cipher to decrypt it. This process prevents the loss of sensitive information via hacking. Decryption, the inverse of encryption, is the process of turning ciphertext into readable plaintext. Ciphertext is not to be confused with codetext because the latter is a result of a code, not a cipher.
Articles related to cryptography include:
The Beale ciphers are a set of three ciphertexts, one of which allegedly states the location of a buried treasure of gold, silver and jewels estimated to be worth over 43 million US dollars as of January 2018. Comprising three ciphertexts, the first (unsolved) text describes the location, the second (solved) ciphertext accounts the content of the treasure, and the third (unsolved) lists the names of the treasure's owners and their next of kin.
Herbert James Sanborn, Jr. is an American sculptor. He is best known for creating the encrypted Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Kim Zetter is an American investigative journalist and author who has covered cybersecurity and national security since 1999. She has broken numerous stories over the years about NSA surveillance, WikiLeaks, and the hacker underground, including an award-winning series about the security problems with electronic voting machines. She has three times been voted one of the top ten security journalists in the U.S. by her journalism peers and security professionals. She is considered one of the world's experts on Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm used to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, and published a book on the topic called Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon.
Edward Michael Scheidt is a retired Chairman of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Cryptographic Center and the designer of the cryptographic systems used in the Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
James J. Gillogly is an American computer scientist and cryptographer.
The Cyrillic Projector is a sculpture created by American artist Jim Sanborn in the early 1990s, and purchased by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1997. It is currently installed between the campus's Friday and Fretwell Buildings.
The Beaufort cipher, created by Sir Francis Beaufort, is a substitution cipher similar to the Vigenère cipher, with a slightly modified enciphering mechanism and tableau. Its most famous application was in a rotor-based cipher machine, the Hagelin M-209. The Beaufort cipher is based on the Beaufort square which is essentially the same as a Vigenère square but in reverse order starting with the letter "Z" in the first row, where the first row and the last column serve the same purpose.
The Smithy code is a series of letters embedded, as a private amusement, within the April 2006 approved judgement of Mr Justice Peter Smith on The Da Vinci Code copyright case. The judge publicly admitted that "I can't discuss the judgement, but I don't see why a judgement should not be a matter of fun." It was first broken, in the same month, by Dan Tench, a lawyer who writes on media issues for The Guardian, after he received a series of email clues about it from Justice Smith.
The Chaocipher is a cipher method invented by John Francis Byrne in 1918 and described in his 1953 autobiographical Silent Years. He believed Chaocipher was simple, yet unbreakable. Byrne stated that the machine he used to encipher his messages could be fitted into a cigar box. He offered cash rewards for anyone who could solve it.
The Mengenlehreuhr or Berlin-Uhr is the first public clock in the world that tells the time by means of illuminated, coloured fields, for which it entered the Guinness Book of Records upon its installation on 17 June 1975. Commissioned by the Senate of Berlin and designed by Dieter Binninger, the original full-sized Mengenlehreuhr was originally located at the Kurfürstendamm on the corner with Uhlandstraße in what was then West Berlin. After the Senate decommissioned it in 1995, the clock was relocated to a site in Budapester Straße in front of Europa-Center, where it stands today.
Antipodes is a public artwork by American sculptor Jim Sanborn located outside of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, United States.
Elonka Dunin is an American video game developer and cryptologist. Dunin worked at Simutronics Corp. in St. Louis, Missouri from 1990–2014, and in 2015 was Senior Producer at Black Gate Games in Nashville, Tennessee. She is Chairperson Emerita and one of the founders of the International Game Developers Association's Online Games group, has contributed or been editor in chief on multiple IGDA State of the Industry white papers, and was one of the Directors of the Global Game Jam from 2011–2014. As of 2020 she works as a management consultant at Accenture.
References
1 2 "Kryptos sculpture". Central Intelligence Agency. Intellipedia. July 18, 2017. Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room. Archived from the original on January 7, 2024. Retrieved January 7, 2024.
↑ Sanborn, Jim (December 15, 1989). "Project Explanation"(PDF). American Cryptogram Association (a courtesy message directed to "Agency Employers"). LVII: 8. Archived(PDF) from the original on August 27, 2016.
1 2 "FAQ About Kryptos". elonka.com. December 14, 2003. Q: How much did Kryptos cost?. Archived from the original on April 21, 2024. Retrieved November 12, 2011.
↑ Stein, David D. (July 23, 2018). "Cracking the Courtyard Crypto". CIA. Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room. Archived from the original on January 7, 2024. Retrieved January 7, 2024.
↑ Bessonette, Colin (November 16, 1998). "Q&A on the News". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. p.A2. A CIA analyst working on his own time has solved 'the lion's share' of it, but it hasn't been completely decoded, CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield told Q&A. He said the best way to describe the sculpture is to say it incorporates natural building materials native to America and includes an encoded copper screen. When and if someone completely solves the message, a decision will be made about releasing it to the public, 'but we're not at that point yet,' Mansfield said.
↑ Zetter, Kim (November 20, 2014). "Finally, a New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture". Wired. Archived from the original on January 6, 2015. Retrieved November 25, 2014. in 2006, Sanborn realized he had also made an inadvertent error, a missing "x" that he mistakenly deleted from the end of a line in passage 2, a passage that was already solved.
↑ Malek, Jaromir (May 15, 2006). Hutchison, Sue; Miles, Elizabeth; Magee, Diana; Rawlinson, Kent; Allen, Lindsay; Hobby, Alison; Malek, Jaromir (eds.). "Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation". ashmolean.org. Designed by Jonathan Moffett. Griffith Institute. Archived from the original on May 18, 2007.
↑ "A New Clue to 'Kryptos'". The New York Times. Photos by Drew Angerer. November 20, 2014. Archived from the original on March 14, 2024. Retrieved November 21, 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
Jonathan Binstock and Jim Sanborn (2003). Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction. Corcoran Gallery of Art. ISBN0-88675-072-5. (contains 1–2 pages about Kryptos)
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