Kryptos

This article is about the sculpture. For other uses, see Kryptos (disambiguation).

Kryptos at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia

Kryptos is a sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears. Of the four sections, three have been solved, with the fourth remaining one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world. The sculpture continues to provide a diversion for some employees of the CIA and other cryptanalysts attempting to decrypt the messages.

Description

The main sculpture is made of red and green slate, white quartz, petrified wood, lodestone, and copper, and is located in the northwest corner of the New Headquarters Building courtyard, outside of the Agency cafeteria.

The name Kryptos comes from the Greek word for "hidden", and the theme of the sculpture is "intelligence gathering." The most prominent feature is a large vertical S-shaped copper screen resembling a scroll, or piece of paper emerging from a computer printer, covered with characters comprising encrypted text. The characters consist of the 26 letters of the standard Roman alphabet and question marks cut out of the copper. This "inscription" contains four separate enigmatic messages, three of which have been solved.

At the same time as the main sculpture was installed, sculptor Sanborn also placed several other pieces around 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 engraved in the copper, and one of the slabs has an engraved compass rose. Other elements of Sanborn's installation include a landscaped area, a duck pond, and several other seemingly unmarked slabs.

The cost of the sculpture was $250,000.

Encrypted messages

The ciphertext on one half of the main sculpture contains 869 characters in total — in April 2006, however, Sanborn released information stating that an intended letter on the main half of Kryptos was missing. This would bring the total number of characters to 870 on the main portion. The other half of the sculpture comprises a Vigenère encryption tableau, comprising 869 characters, if spaces are counted.

Sanborn worked with a retiring CIA employee named Ed Scheidt, Chairman of the CIA Cryptographic Center, to come up with the cryptographic systems used on the sculpture. Sanborn has revealed that the sculpture contains a riddle within a riddle, which will be solvable only after the four encrypted passages have been decrypted. He said that he gave the complete solution at the time of the sculpture's dedication to then-CIA director William H. Webster. Sanborn said, however, that he had not given Webster the entire solution. He did, however, confirm that where in part 2 it says "Who knows the exact location? Only WW," that "WW" was intended to refer to William Webster. Sanborn also confirmed that should he die before the entire sculpture becomes deciphered that there will be someone able to confirm the solution.

Solvers

Over the years, only three individuals have uncovered parts of the solutions. The first person to publicly announce solving the first three sections, in 1999, was James Gillogly, a computer scientist from southern California. He and others thought at the time that he had correctly deciphered the sections K1, K2 and K3. After Gillogly's announcement, the CIA revealed that their analyst David Stein had also thought he had solved the same sections in 1998, using pencil and paper techniques, though at the time of his solution the information was only disseminated within the intelligence community, and no public announcement was made. The NSA also claimed at that time that they had solvers, but would not reveal names or dates until 2005, when it was learned that a NSA team led by Ken Miller, along with Dennis McDaniels and two other unnamed individuals, had thought they had solved parts 1–3 using a computer in late 1992. All of these early attempts to solve Kryptos presumed that K2 ended with WESTIDBYROWS. They were mistaken.

It wasn't until October 10, 2005, that Ms. Monet Friedrich, a computer engineer from Vancouver, British Columbia came across the character sequence LAYERTWO at the end of K2.

To clarify.. Where all earlier attempts proposed that K2 ended with the plain text

...FOUR SECONDS WEST IDBYROWS,

Monet discovered that K2 ended with the plain text

...FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYERTWO.

Monet's revelation came six months before Jim Sanborn announced an error. This 'error' served to confirm Monet's find.

Solutions

The following are the solutions of parts 1–3 of the sculpture. Misspellings present in the code are included as-is. Kryptos K1 and K2 ciphers are polyalphabetic substitution, using a Vigenere Tableau similar to the tableau on the other half of the sculpture. K3 is a transposition cipher, and K4 is still unsolved.

Solution 1

Keywords: Kryptos, Palimpsest

BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION

Solution 2

Keywords: Kryptos, Abscissa

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

On April 19, 2006, Sanborn contacted the Kryptos Group (an online community dedicated to the Kryptos puzzle) to inform them that the accepted solution to part 2 was wrong. He said that he made an error in the sculpture by omitting an "X" used to indicate a break for aesthetic reasons, and that the decrypted text which ended "...FOUR SECONDS WEST ID BY ROWS" should actually be "...FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO".

Note: The coordinates mentioned in the plaintext: 38°57′6.5″N 77°8′44″W; on Google Maps; analysis of the cited location. The point is about 200 feet southwest of the sculpture itself.

Solution 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 Q (?)

This is a paraphrased and misspelled 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. The question with which it ends is that posed by Lord Carnarvon, to which Carter (in the book) famously replied "wonderful things". In the actual November 26, 1922 field notes, his reply was, "Yes, it is wonderful."

Solution 4

Part 4 remains unsolved, though there is an active Yahoo! Group (formed in 2003) that coordinates the work of over 2000 members toward decryption of the code.

To solve it, it is crucial to have the first three sections correct, since when commenting on his error in section 2, Sanborn said they contain the clues to the last section. In November 2010, Jim Sanborn released a clue that letters 64-69 NYPVTT equals the word BERLIN. He also mentioned the word "directions" in an NPR interview claiming he needs to "stop talking before he says too much."

Related sculptures

Kryptos is the first cryptographic sculpture made by Sanborn. After Kryptos, however, he went on to make several other sculptures with codes and other types of writing, including one called Antipodes which is at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., an "Untitled Kryptos Piece" which was sold to a private collector, and a Cyrillic Projector with encrypted Russian text, which included an extract from a classified KGB document. The cipher on one side of Antipodes repeats the text from CIA's Kryptos. Much of the cipher on its Russian side is duplicated on the Cyrillic Projector. The Russian portion of the cipher on the Cyrillic Projector and Antipodes was solved in 2003 after Elonka Dunin "led the charge", with the ciphertext independently decrypted by Frank Corr and Mike Bales, and plaintext translation from Russian provided by Dunin.

Pop culture references

The dust jacket of the US version of Dan Brown's 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 part 2 (see above), except the degrees 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 other reference is hidden in the brown "tear" artwork—upside-down words which say "Only WW knows." These are another reference to Kryptos Part 2.

Kryptos is one of the themes in Dan Brown's 2009 novel, The Lost Symbol.

A small version of Kryptos appears in the season 5 episode of Alias, "S.O.S.". In it, Marshall Flinkman, in a small moment of comic relief, 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.

The musical group Between the Buried and Me has a reference to Kryptos in their song "Obfuscation" from the 2009 album, The Great Misdirect.

An image of Kryptos is hidden in the background artwork of the 2010 game Fantasy University.

References

Books

• Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction. 2003. ISBN 0-88675-072-5. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authors= ignored (help) (contains 1–2 pages about Kryptos)
• Dunin, Elonka (2006). The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms. Constable & Robinson. p. 500. ISBN 0-7867-1726-2.
• Dunin, Elonka (2009). "Kryptos: The Unsolved Enigma". Secrets of the Lost Symbol: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code Sequel. Harper Collins. pp. 319–326. ISBN 9780061964954. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |editors= ignored (|editor= suggested) (help)
• Dunin, Elonka (2009). "Art, Encryption, and the Preservation of Secrets: An interview with Jim Sanborn". Secrets of the Lost Symbol: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code Sequel. Harper Collins. pp. 294–300. ISBN 9780061964954. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |editors= ignored (|editor= suggested) (help)
• Taylor, Greg (2009). "Decoding Kryptos". In John Weber (ed.) (ed.). Illustrated Guide to the Lost Symbol. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9781416523666. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)

Articles

• CIA website on Kryptos
• "CIA's Artistic Enigma Reveals All but Final Clues", June 16, 1999, New York Times
• "Cracking the Code of a CIA Sculpture", July 19, 1999, Washington Post
• "Gillogly Cracks CIA Art", & "The Kryptos Code Unmasked", 1999, New York Times and Cypherpunks archive
• "Unlocking the secret of Kryptos", March 17, 2000, Sun Journal
• "Solving the Enigma of Kryptos", January 26, 2005, Wired, by Kim Zetter
• "CIA sculpture 'kryptos' draws mystery lovers", May 27, 2005, Wall Street Journal
• "Interest grows in solving cryptic CIA puzzle after link to Da Vinci Code", June 11, 2005, The Guardian
• "Cracking the Code", June 19, 2005, CNN
• "Typo Confounds Kryptos Sleuths", April 20, 2006 Wired, by Kim Zetter
• "Mission Impossible: The Code Even the CIA Can't Crack", April 20, 2009 Wired, by Steven Levy

External links

• Kryptos photos by Jim Gillogly
• Kryptos website maintained by Elonka Dunin (includes Kryptos FAQ, transcript, pictures and further links)
• Patrick Foster's Kryptos page
• Segment on Kryptos from PBS' Nova ScienceNow
• Kryptos Revisited (Download New Kryptos Font, articles, solutions, and news)
• Gary Phillips' Kryptos page (animated solutions and Kryptos resources)
• Richard Gay's Kryptos pages
• Monet's Kryptos Observations
• The Kryptos Project by Jew-Lee Lann

Aerial photos of Kryptos location

• USGS aerial image of McLean, Virginia
• Google Maps
• The location referred to in the part 2 cleartext (Google Maps) - approximately 150 feet southeast of the Kryptos sculpture.