
A New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture - triggerworlds
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/second-kryptos-clue/
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keypusher
I am inclined to believe that the 4th piece is written in a foreign language
or otherwise multiply-encoded, or that Sanborn made a drastic error in the
cryptography. The other 3 sections were solved independently in a much shorter
time. For instance, the NSA was the first to crack the first three parts of
the sculpture, and they did it in only 2 days. The fact that nobody has made
any progress on the 4th section in well over a decade even with a known clue
is hard to reconcile.

> Then “within two days of receiving the information tasking from Chief, Z,”
> they had solved parts one through three of the puzzle. They spent another
> day on the fourth section, but very quickly “a decision was made to stop any
> further work” on it. “Given the suspected cryptography, the last section is
> too short to solve without diverting a great deal of effort from operational
> problems,” they wrote in the memo.

Elonka Dunin is the maintainer of the well-known Yahoo Kryptos group, and
maintains the primary reference page.

[http://elonka.com/kryptos/](http://elonka.com/kryptos/)

Wired ran an interesting article about the NSA's original crack of the
scultpure, which I have quoted from above.

[http://www.wired.com/2013/07/nsa-cracked-kryptos-before-
cia/](http://www.wired.com/2013/07/nsa-cracked-kryptos-before-cia/)

~~~
davekeck
Apparently a mistake exists in Part 2 of the sculpture so it's plausible that
there's more. From the Wikipedia article:

> There are also a few incorrect letters in the ciphertext which Sanborn has
> said were intentional, and a few letters near the beginning of the bottom
> half have been displaced from their normal positions, apparently
> intentionally... One of the lines of the tableau is one character too long,
> which Sanborn has indicated was accidental.

It's tough to imagine how to start such a problem when you can't even rely on
the ciphertext being correct.

~~~
pmorici
"It's tough to imagine how to start such a problem when you can't even rely on
the ciphertext being correct."

That's a common problem in the real world. A lot of ciphertext, at least
historically, comes from radio signals and if your receiver doesn't get a good
copy of the signal you've got what you've got.

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bostonpete
> Sanborn realized he had also made an inadvertent error, a missing “x” that
> he mistakenly deleted from the end of a line in section two

I can't imagine the horror that accompanied that realization. I get anxiety
when I notice a typo after an e-mail goes out. A typo into an encrypted
sculpture that's so high profile must have been upsetting...

------
jlgaddis

      Be sure to drink your Ovaltine

~~~
jbigelow76
A crummy commercial? Sonofabitch.

~~~
vegedor
An expression of his confidence that it won't be encrypt, as he was looking at
the breakfast table for a phrase?

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Swizec
Personally, if I was the artist making such a sculpture, I would just use a
one-time pad, use a key that's as long as the message, and burn my notes.

Then I would laugh maniacally at the brilliance of my troll for ever and ever.

~~~
meowface
Well in that case you might as well just scribble `head -c 1000 /dev/urandom |
base32`.

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trentmb
I'm mostly curious as to how the sculpture got approved without anyone else
knowing what it said.

~~~
fsckin
>Sanborn was forced to provide Webster with the solution to the puzzle to
reassure the CIA that it wasn’t something that would embarrass the agency.

~~~
ChrisGranger
>However, in 2005 Sanborn revealed to WIRED that Scheidt and Webster only
thought they knew the solution. In fact, he had deceived them.

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mindcrime
I'm betting the whole thing ultimately just reads:

"Hello, sweetie"

~~~
Raphmedia
"Hello, world!" would be nice.

~~~
Swizec
Yes, but then it wouldn't be River Song sending a message to the last
surviving Time Lord now would it?

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EGreg
[http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-mysterious-
texts.php](http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-mysterious-texts.php)

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ganzuul
Bet the message appears at noon, midsummer's day.

