This is Part 2 about Kryptos and the first post can be found here. In this post i will focus more on
speculations, brainstorming and solutions attempts.
One noticeable fact is, that the letters KRYPTOS somehow are involved in the decryption process of all previous ciphers. In K1 and K2 they were directly used as one of the keywords in the Vigenère-Variant Quagmire3. For K3 there are several ways to transpose the ciphertext in order to reveal the plaintext, but one of them has to do with ordering/reordering the letters of KRYPTOS alphabetically. So, it seems plausible, that also in K4 these letters play a role in one or the other way. A further hint towards this is, that the letters of KRYPTOS all appear on the right side or in direct neighborhood on the left side, as marked below:
$\small{\texttt{25| E C D M R I P F E I M E H N L S S T T R T V D O H W ? }}$$\small{\texttt{ O B }}$$\small{\texttt{ K R }}$
$\small{\texttt{26| U O X O G H U L B S O L I F B B W F L R V Q Q P R N G K S }}$$\small{\texttt{ S O }}$
$\small{\texttt{27| }}$$\small{\texttt{ T }}$$\small{\texttt{ W T Q S J Q S S E K Z Z W A T J K L U D I A W I N F B N }}$$\small{\texttt{ Y P }}$
$\small{\texttt{28| V T T M Z F P K W G D K Z X T J C D I G K U H U A U E K C A R }}$
The position of the seven letters for KRYPTOS are all touching each other. This seems too strange to be by chance and i am not the first who mentioned this [1].
Friday, March 17, 2017
Friday, March 03, 2017
Kryptos - The Cipher (Part 1)
Introduction
KRYPTOS - Von Jim Sanborn - Jim Sanborn, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8253447 |
- KRYPTOS was constructed in Nov. 1990 on the ground of the CIA Headquarter in Langley, Virginia by Jim Sanborn
- It contains 4 ciphers (K1,K2,K3,K4) on its left side and some kind of Vigenère-Table on its right side.
- K1, K2 and K3 were solved by James Gillogly in 1999. Afterwards, the CIA and later the NSA claimed that they had a solution to the first three ciphers at an earlier point in time.
- Ed Scheidt, a cryptoanalyst and former director of the CIA, gave Sanborn the input of possible cryptographic techniques to use.
- K1 is a variant of the Vigenère-Cipher (Quagmire 3) with the codewords KRYPTOS and PALIMPSEST
- K2 is a variant of the Vigenère-Cipher (Quagmire 3) with the codewords KRYPTOS and ABSCISSA
- K3 is a Transposition cipher
- Jim Sanborn said that the previous ciphers K1,K2 and K3 contain information that will help to solve the last cipher K4
- 2010 Sanborn published the clue that the 6 letters from 64-69 of the ciphertext K4 decrypt to 'BERLIN'. Four years later, he revealed that the characters 70-74 decrypt to 'CLOCK'
- However, K4 remains unsolved.
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