Kryptos - The Cipher (Part 6-a)

█ During the Christmas period, I spent many hours reading news articles and forum discussions about Kryptos. I reread some of the old topics on the Yahoo Kryptos Group. It is always surprising to see the findings from many years ago that have somehow been forgotten. I don't mean they're forgotten, just not on the current radar. 

Especially three topics raised my attention: 

1. The Pre-K, i.e. Mini Kryptos Sculpture 
2. The methods to generate the first key PALIMPSEST for K1 
3. And the reveal of the word ASTATOS in K2

In this post, I want to show how these topics might be connected. This post covers the first of the three points, Parts 6-b and Part 6-c follow the next days.

1. Pre-K - Mini Kryptos Sculpture

Krypos Mini Sculpture (Pre-K)

This post examines the “Pre-K” mini Kryptos sculpture and its ciphertext. By revisiting previous community findings, I will explore whether anomalies in the decryption could indicate deliberate design elements that were later reused in the main Kryptos sculpture. I mentioned the Mini Sculpture from Sanborn, now known as the 'Pre-K', already previously in a blog post. During a live Q&A event at Ed Scheidt's house, he placed it on the table [1]. It is actually older than the original statue.

It is not easy to extract the text from the picture [2;high resolution image], especially from the ciphertext (bottom right). The last three letters of each row are hidden due to the S-shape nature of the sculpture. I am not sure how the complete ciphertext was finally obtained, but the letters that the community agrees are correct are given below. [The light-grey letters are those which are not visibe on the picture]

T I J V M S R S H V X O M C J V X O E N A
K Q U U C L W Y X V H Z T F G J M K J H G
D Y R P M A S M Z Z N A K C U E U R R H J
K L G E M V F M O K C U E U R K S V V M Z
Y Y Z I U T J J U J C Z Z I T R F H V C T
X N N V B G I X K J N Z F X K T B V Y Y X
N B Z Y I A K N V E K P Y Z I U T J Y C A

The ciphertext repeats from this point onwards. The missing letters cannot have been obtained simply by completing the plaintext, as the final letter in the first row ('A') results in an incorrect plaintext letter.

Decrypting the ciphertext using the original Vigenère cipher (i.e. with no keyed alphabet) and the keyword 'RUG' yields the following:

R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G
C O D E S M A Y B E D I V I D E D I N T U
R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G
T W O D I F F E R E N T C L A S S E S N A
R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G
M E L Y S U B S T I T U T I O N A L A N D
R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G
T R A N S P O S I T I O N A L T Y P E S T
R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G
H E T R A N S P O S I T I O N A L B E I N
R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G
G T H E H A R D E S T T O D E C H P H E R
R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G
W H T H O U T T P N Q J H F C D Z D H I U

*I marked the errors as well as the gibberish reminder in red color. The used keyletter is written overhead the corresponding plaintext letter.

It is strange that Sanborn did not use Quagmire-3 as he did for Kryptos and as the other panels of the mini sculpture indicate. The keyword GIRASOL is used for example in the upper right quadrant to create the typically keyed-alphabet.

GIRASOLBCDEFHJKMNPQTUVWXYZ

As you can see, it is the 'A' in the last letter of the first row that is responsible for the 'U' in 'INTU' rather than 'INTO'. If anyone knows how the last three columns of letters were obtained and why the community agreed on this ciphertext, please leave a note. 

The decrypted text makes perfect, except for the final 14 characters. However, there are three spelling errors, which are reminiscent of the original Kryptos statue. It looks like a small proof of concept, which probably contains some of the ideas Sanborn used later. Remember, Pre-K is older.

This leads to the obvious question: What happened to the last 14 characters? 

1) One solution is to slightly shift the decryption key, i.e., delete the 'U' over 'T' (the first of the 14 remaining letters) and start the key at this position with GRUGRU... . What you get is:

R U G R U G R G R U G R U G R U G R U G R
W H T H O U T H E K E Y E T R A N S E W J

This looks like english text but permuted. As the plaintext itself talks about transpositional ciphers, this could be simply a transposed plaintext. You for example you can permute this to:

HEKEYETRANSEWJ ↝ THEANSWERKEYJE

We get, using punctuation, the string "the answer-key. J.E.". The word "answer-key" is a little bit uncommon but you find it. The last two letters "J.E." could just be a signature for Jim and Ed, which are the two authors of the sculpture. Maybe this is the correct ending of the plaintext, i dont know. 

 

2) A second option is, instead of deleting one letter of the key, to insert one letter in the ciphertext. This is exactly what Sanborn told us to do for the ciphertext K2. The letter we have to insert in the ciphertext is probably the letter 'N' to get 'THE KEY':

N B Z Y I A K N N V E K P Y Z I U T J Y C A

We now have 22 characters in the last row. They decrypt to

R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R U G R
W H T H O U T T H E K E Y E T R A N S E W J

The plaintext ends now again with the reasonable words "WITHOUT THE KEY", but we are left this time with nine gibberish letters. They still contain the word ANSWER, but now also J,E and T.  

 

You could try to run an anagram generator on this letters, and also add the missspellings to the letter pool (i.e. U,H,H (false ones) and O,I,I (correct ones)). Or you could use the GIROSOL-alphabet etc... Many options but none of them are satisfying.

 

3) But what you could also do [3] is the following (but this time using the last 15 letters of the last line): If you use the string RRRRRRGGGGGGGGG as the key:

* * * * * * R R R R R R G G G G G G G G G
* * * * * * K N V E K P Y Z I U T J Y C A

then this decrypts to

* * * * * * R R R R R R G G G G G G G G G
* * * * * * T W E N T Y S T C O N D S W U

Which should probably read to "TWENTY SECONDS WE[ST]". The two "E"s are wrong and we have to adjust the key to

* * * * * * R R R R R R G V G G G G G G W
* * * * * * T W E N T Y S E C O N D S W E

This is a strange coincidence and reminds me of a Palimpsest. I wouldn't be so excited if were just some random two word. But these particular words fit perfectly to the plaintext of K2 which also contains the similar passages:

THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH

SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST

Given a ciphertext and you are free to choose the key, you can generate every plaintext you like. What makes this remarkable is that the derived key is highly structured, not arbitrary — which strongly suggests intentional design rather than coincidence. The drawback is that we have to use the last 15 characters of the final row, which means the T from WITHOUT is lost and does not fit with the rest of the text.

I think we can learn something from the miniature sculpture. Sanborn tested some of his ideas on a toy example. The spelling errors are probably similar to those in K1–K3, and understanding their purpose in the miniature sculpture may help us to understand their meaning in Kryptos. Whether we can learn something from K4 is questionable. Perhaps the last 14 gibberish letters are related to K4, hinting that the key must be realigned — I don't know. 

[1] http://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2015/10/30/kryptos/
[2] https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/files/2015/11/2015-10-24-Kryptos-4.jpg
[3] https://kryptos.groups.io/g/main/topic/34665583#msg17673