Saturday, July 07, 2018

Kryptos - The Cipher (Part 3)

This post is about is more or less a collection of several approaches and facts that has been said as well as some speculations.

▊ B-ary integer representation. According to [1] during a Question and Answer round, Jim Sanborn was asked again about the hint BERLIN. The question was if N decodes to B, Y decodes to E, etc, etc. and Jim confirmed it does. Emphatically. It is written, that Jim Sanborn rattled through the entire crib:
\begin{align}
  \texttt{N} &\stackrel{\text{decode}}{\rightarrow} \texttt{B} \\
  \texttt{Y} &\stackrel{\text{decode}}{\rightarrow}  \texttt{E} \\
  \texttt{P} &\stackrel{\text{decode}}{\rightarrow}  \texttt{R} \\
  \texttt{V} &\stackrel{\text{decode}}{\rightarrow}  \texttt{L} \\
  \texttt{T} &\stackrel{\text{decode}}{\rightarrow}  \texttt{I} \\
  \texttt{T} &\stackrel{\text{decode}}{\rightarrow}  \texttt{N}
\end{align} When the same question was asked to Ed, Jim cut in and said “I’m the only one who knows.” If we trust Sanborn, this neglects any form of Transpositional Cipher. So also the promising approach from Scott to use Quagmire3 with EMUFPHZLRFA (the first eleven letters from K1) and the linear congruence $77$+$38$x mod $97$, which yields BERLIN at the correct position, must be a dead end.

KRYPTOS - Unaligned letters; Source [1]
As i already wrote previously, Sanborn said that there are many interesting clocks in Berlin but we should delve into that particular clock. Hence many people tried to use the special way this clock works in order to get hints towards the used encryption system for K4. And the special way is, that the Berlin Clock uses a base 5 representation to illuminate the time.So lets stay with the idea that a different base representation of integers is the key to solve K4. Are the further hints towards such a usage? Yes, there are:
  1. In the YouTube Video [4], Ed Scheidt mentions at least one time different base representation of information
  2. The upperscript letters in row Y,A,R in row $15$. The also form the word ARY which is the typical term when talking about different base notations, e.g., $3$-ary numbers, binARY number, tenARY numbers or in general $b$-ary numbers. 
  3. He created other sculptures using binary numbers (IRS Computing Center) [3].