Ed Scheidts Mayan Symbols

 ▉ In this post I want to talk about a thing from the Kryptos universe that are not directly related to the statue.

▉ Mayan Symbols ▉

I think everyone who knows Kryptos knows Ed Scheidt. The former Chairman of the Cryptographic Center at the CIA and founder of the cryptosystems used around the Kryptos statue. As already shown in Part 4 of my Kryptos series, in the driveway of Ed Scheidts house, there are two symbols:

Figure 1 - Garage driveway of Ed Scheidt

We denote the left symbol set with $S_1$ and the right one with $S_2$. It took me a while to find his house on Google Maps - Street View. To save you some time, here is the link with a view on the driveway. I you go back in time in Streetview, you can see that the symbols were already there in 2012. But it is impossible to say when they were built. $S_1$ is clearly visible from the street, $S_2$ is hidden in the view. But you can use Maps (iOS) to see their positions (See Figure 2):

Figure 2 - Birds view of the driveway with marked positions of the two symbols

Kryptos - The Cipher (Part 5)

ONE of the most surprising facts about Kryptos is that no one has yet discovered the expected way to find the keywords for K1 and K2. And perhaps this missing fact is the key to why we are stuck with K4. I don't think Sanborn wanted us to bruteforce the solutions (as we did), but somehow left a clue that we haven't seen yet.

Most people believe, that the morse code messages around Kryptos should somehow encode at least the first codeword for K1 (= Palimpsest). That's why the Morse code message are often called K0.

The Morse code messages are part of two pieces of granite with contained copper plates. I found two very interesting drawings of these two installations by Monet Friedrich on [1]:

Kryptos - The Cipher (Part 4)

EASTNORTHEAST - This is not exactly the hint Jim Sanborn (JS) gave for K4 on the 29th of January this year. He only gave NORTHEAST - which refers to the positions 26-34 of K4's plaintext.  Beside BERLIN and CLOCK it is the third revealed plaintext word of K4. However, also this hint does not seem to help much. 

However, it just so happened, that a member in the yahoo kryptos group had a conversation with Jim Sanborn due to a submitted solution. Sandborn's answer to the question contained again the last clue which surprisingly was EASTNORTHEAST at position 22-34. There is disagreement if Jim revealed this on purpose or he did it accidentially, but the new extended clue seem to be serious and valid. 

Interestingly, EASTNORTHEAST is exactly the direction which is illustrated on the
wind rose on one of the stones around kryptos, also created by Jim Sanborn.

Below you can see that new hint at the position in the plaintext:

                                                       O B K R 

 U O X O G H U L B S O L I F B B W E A S T N O R T H E A S T O 

T 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 B E R

L I N C L O C K W G D K Z X T J C D I G K U H U A U E K C A R

 

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].

Kryptos - The Cipher (Part 2)

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].

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

Since I think that KRYPTOS does not need any introduction, I will only give you a brief description of one of the most famous and only partially solved ciphers known today:

1. KRYPTOS was constructed in Nov. 1990 on the ground of the CIA Headquarter in Langley, Virginia by Jim Sanborn
2. It contains 4 ciphers (K1,K2,K3,K4) on its left side and some kind of Vigenère-Table on its right side.
3. 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.
4. Ed Scheidt, a cryptoanalyst and former director of the CIA, gave Sanborn the input of possible cryptographic techniques to use.
5. K1 is a variant of the Vigenère-Cipher (Quagmire 3) with the codewords KRYPTOS and PALIMPSEST
6. K2 is a variant of the Vigenère-Cipher (Quagmire 3) with the codewords KRYPTOS and ABSCISSA
7. K3 is a Transposition cipher
8. Jim Sanborn said that the previous ciphers K1,K2 and K3 contain information that will help to solve the last cipher K4
9. 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'
10. However, K4 remains unsolved. 

This post is more of introductory nature, so if you already know a lot of KRYPTOS you will probably not learn anything new.