Jim Sanborn’s Kryptos – The Hidden Message at CIA Headquarters

#KryptosMystery #CIACipher #UnsolvedCodes #JimSanborn #Cryptography #VirginiaMysteries Kryptos is an encrypted sculpture by the American artist, Jim Sanborn, that is located on the grounds of theCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990 IT TOOK MORE than eight years for a CIA analyst and a California computer scientist to crack three of the four coded messages The first part of the sculpture used a periodic polyalphabetic substitution cipher using 10 alphabets, and when decrypted was a poetic phrase that Sanborn had composed himself: “Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion” (“iqlusion” was an intentional misspelling of illusion). Part two used a periodic polyalphabetic substitution cipher using 8 alphabets. When decrypted, the passage hinted at something buried: It was totally invisible. How’s that possible? They used the Earth’s magnetic field. x The information was gathered and transmitted underground 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. In fact, Sanborn had made an error in the puzzle and inadvertently introduced a typo in the section. The mistake involved an “x” that he intentionally deleted from the end of a line in section two for aesthetic reasons, to keep the sculpture visually balanced. The “x” was supposed to signify a period or section break at the end of a phrase, but Sanborn removed it thinking it wouldn’t affect the way the puzzle was deciphered. It turned out the “x” made all the difference, however. Part three used a keyed columnar transposition cipher, which the cryptanalysts partly diagnosed solely by “eyeballing” the text. “The most likely explanation for this is a transposition system,” they write, “perhaps a keyed columnar transposition. In such a system, the plain text is inscribed horizontally into a matrix, normally a rectangle, and then the latter are extracted vertically, according to a pre-determined sequence.” When decrypted, it was a paraphrased page taken from the diary of archaeologist Howard Carter describing the opening of a door in King Tut’s tomb on Nov. 26, 1922. Slowly, desperately 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 “He plopped down on the couch in the living room, picked up his draft notes for K3,” the source said. “He had tinkered with it before but could never get into it. He knew it was just basic transposition, so he started with the letter Q and [the letter U after it] and found there were five instances of the letter U, and he just tried all five of those. Then he had to try every other vowel that came after and he finally found something that broke it. By then it was about 4am and he was done.” Unfortunately the fourth section stymied the NSA code breakers, as it has continued to do other cryptanalysts for 23 years. The documents noted that “although ideas abound” for deciphering it, the final 97 characters of the sculpture “continue to elude solution.” They speculated that this section might employ a combination of the techniques used in other sections. “First the message is encrypted using some set of alphabets,” they write, “as was done in the first and third breakthroughs, and then the cipher is put through a transposition, such as that used in the second breakthrough.” But even with that they were never able to solve it. “In part of the code that’s been deciphered, I refer to an act that took place when I was at the agency and a location that’s on the ground of the agency,” Sanborn told Wired in 2005. He may be referring to something he buried on the CIA grounds, though he won’t say for sure. The decrypted text gives latitude and longitude coordinates (38 57 6.5 N, 77 8 44 W), which Sanborn has said refer to “locations of the agency.” So sleuths will have to first decipher the code then find their way onto the CIA grounds and locate that place in order to finally discover what it all means.