Crack the First Two Kryptos Ciphertexts: CIA’s Secret Codes Revealed 🕵️‍♂️

#cryptology, #cryptography, #cryptanalysis

In this video, we present how to break two (K1 and K2) of four encrypted messages of the famous Kryptos sculpture, which is located at the CIA's headquarters building.

Kryptos was created by artist Jim Sanborn in 1990. Three of the four encrypted messages of the sculpture have been solved by Jim Gillogly. In parallel, NSA employees also solved the messages, but did not publish their findings (in that time). The fourth of the messages is still unbroken.

Here, we first give a short introduction of the messages. Also, we briefly introduce the Vigenère cipher and Autokey cipher.

After that, we create our own Vigenère ciphers in CrypTool 2. Finally, we use CrypTool 2's Vigenère analyzer to actually break the first two Kryptos ciphers.

You may download the latest version of CrypTool 2 from here: https://www.cryptool.org/en/ct2/downloads

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