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Kryptos is the name of a sculpture by American artist James Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia, in the United States. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears.
Description
The sculpture is made of red granite, red and green slate, white quartz, petrified wood, lodestone and copper, and is located in the northwest corner of the New Headquarters Building courtyard. The name comes from the Greek word for "hidden", and the theme of the sculpture is "intelligence gathering." The most prominent feature of the sculpture is a large vertical S-shaped copper screen resembling a scroll, or piece of paper emerging from a computer printer, covered with characters. The characters consist of the 26 letters of the standard alphabet and question marks cut out of the copper. This "inscription" contains four separate 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.
At the same time as the sculpture was installed, sculptor Sanborn also placed several other pieces around CIA grounds, such as several large granite slabs with sandwiched copper messages outside the entrance to the New Headquarters Building. There is also an engraved compass rose, a duck pond, and several other seemingly unmarked slabs.
The ciphertext on the main sculpture contains 865 characters in total. Sanborn worked with a retiring CIA employee named Ed Scheidt to come up with the cryptographic systems used on the sculpture. 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 director William H. Webster. However, in an interview for wired.com in January 2005, Sanborn said that he had not given the entire solution.
The first person to publicly solve the first three sections, in 1999, was James Gillogly, a computer scientist from southern California, who deciphered 768 of the characters. The remaining 97 or 98 characters are supposedly the same ones which have stumped the government's own cryptanalysts. After Gillogly's announcement, the CIA revealed that their analyst David Stein had also solved the same sections using pencil and paper techniques in 1998, but the information was only disseminated within the intelligence community, and no public announcement was made. The NSA also claimed that a team led by Ken Miller, along with Dennis McDaniels and two other unnamed individuals, had solved parts 1-3 using a computer in late 1992, but that they too had been stumped by the fourth section.
Kryptos is the first cryptographic sculpture made by Sanborn. After Kryptos, however, he went on to make several other code sculptures, including one called Antipodes which is at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, 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 the Russian side of the Cyrillic Projector and Antipodes was cracked in 2003 by an international team led by Elonka Dunin.
The dust jacket of Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code contains a disguised reference to the coordinates mentioned in the plaintext of part 2 (see below), except one digit is off by one.
Solutions
The following solutions are taken from John Wilson's Kryptos page. (Misspellings present in the code are included as-is, and capital letters are intentional as well.)
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 ID BY ROW S
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 (?)
Solution 4
Part 4 remains unsolved.
External links
- CIA website on Kryptos
- NY Times Library ("CIA's Artistic Enigma Reveals All but Final Clues" – June 16, 1999)
- Elonka Dunin's Kryptos page (transcript, many pictures and further links)
- Washington Post ("Cracking the Code of a CIA Sculpture" – July 19, 1999)
- Text of NY Times article + related articles ("Gillogly Cracks CIA Art", & "The Kryptos Code Unmasked")
- Wired News ("Solving the Enigma of Kryptos" – January 21, 2005)
- CNN story, "Cracking the Code", June 19, 2005
- Bill Houck (shows decryption of sections 1 and 2)
- John Wilson's Kryptos page (lots of info and links)
- Patrick Foster's Kryptos page
- Gary Phillips' Kryptos page (animated solutions and Kryptos resources)