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Kryptos

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Kryptos is the name of a wood and metal sculpture by American sculptor James Sanborn on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia in the United States. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, it has been subject of much speculation concerning the encrypted message etched on its surface.

The sculpture is made of located in the northwest corner of the New Headquarters Building courtyard. The theme of this sculpture is "intelligence gathering" The sculpture contains a piece of petrified wood that supports a large S-shaped copper screen resembling a piece of paper emerging from a computer printer. The "paper" is inscribed several enigmatic messages, each apparently encrypted with a different cipher. The sculpture continues to provide a diversion for employees of the CIA and other cryptanalysts attempting to decrypt the messages.

The message on the sculpture contains 865 characters in four parts. Sanborn has since 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 CIA directory William H. Webster, and that the solution has been held in confidence by Webster's successors.

In 1999, James Gillogly, a computer scientist from Southern California was able to decipher the 768 of the characters. The remaining 97 characters are supposedly the same ones which have stumped the CIA's own cyrptanalysts.


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