I swear to you that if you do this work properly, you will one day have a river of flowing gold" - Zozimus (Alexandria 3rd century AD).

Appropriate motto. About the right number of characters. From the right time period. It is the instructions (or more of an admonition) on the correct way to construct the Philosophers's Stone. However it's probably wrong. But that's what I would have encoded on the Kryptos.

The rosetta Stone translated into a proclamation about recsinding certain taxes by Ptolemy V.

?OBKRUOXOG HULBSOLIF BBWFLRVQQ PRNGKSSO TWTQSJQ SSEKZZWAT JKLUDIAWI NFBNYP VTTMZFP KWGDKZXTJC DIGKUHUAUEKCAR

The word "Eureka" can be found in the last part of the cipher if the letters are rearranged.

DIGKUHUAUEKCAR

"UEKCAR" rearrange the letters and drop the "C" to get "Eureka". The Rosetta stone was in Greek, Coptic and another dead language of hieroglyphs. King Tut, Carter et al, dealt with death. Archimedes worked for the Ptolomys.

Maybe its something like, "Nothing is certain but death and taxes"

But some words are in Greek, some in Coptic, or maybe even French.

The sculpture looks like the Rosetta Stone in form and mass.

I think the final undeciphered part of Kryptos will be a passage from the Rosetta Stone. I base this on the pyschological vibes I get from the artist. I think if you put the text of the Rosetta Stone into a codebreaking program, it will quickly identify the particuliar passage. It will probably be the first passage that was deciphered.

July 19, 2007 - Cryptography

A discussion with cryptographer Elonka Dunin about her work including her attempts to decode the message on the "Kryptos" sculpture at the CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

As some of the lead-up to the NOVA show....

Thursday, 7/19, from 11 a.m. to Noon Central, I'll be interviewed on the local NPR station, KWMU. This will *not* be a national broadcast, it's more of a "podcast." Or in other words, if you have any interest, you can tune in to the live stream at kwmu.org. They will also be re-broadcasting locally at 10 p.m., and will have the recording available on their website for about 6 months.

The show will be a one-hour talkshow called "St. Louis on the Air", and I'll be fielding phone-in questions about Kryptos and cryptography.

Caveat: These scheduled times should always be taken with a grain of salt, since things can be pre-empted depending on what else is going on in the news.

FYI,

Elonka :)

NPR Podcast on 7/19: - Elonka talks about Kryptos

Get out your pencils: the most mysterious of all codes in the most clandestine of all places has yet to be fully broken. "Kryptos," a coded sculpture in the courtyard of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, contains a long string of seemingly nonsensical letters that conceal a message devised by sculptor James Sanborn. Correspondent and supersleuth Chad Cohen gets cracking, covering the cipher techniques used by Sanborn and the success of amateur code breaker Jim Gillogly at reading portions of the text. The deciphered sections include a poem, a reference to something buried on CIA grounds, and an extract from an eyewitness report of the discovery of King Tut's tomb. But the beguiling last bit of the message remains a mystery. Solutions anyone?

Okay, we're within "TiVo" time-range, so I figured it was about time I blogged it. Next week, Tuesday night on NOVA, there will be a 15-minute segment on Kryptos. The documentary filmmakers did their homework on this one: There are interviews with Kryptos artist Sanborn, code expert Ed Scheidt (who designed the systems that are used on Kryptos), Jim Gillogly (first person to publicly crack parts 1-3), and yours truly, Kryptos fangirl incarnate. ;) They flew me out to DC, to film an interview at the Hirshhorn museum next to Sanborn's "Antipodes" sculpture (which has all the text of Kryptos, plus encrypted Russian text which we cracked in 2003). I'm looking forward to seeing the segment!

FYI,

Elonka :)

Kryptos on NOVAscienceNOW - July 24, 2007

A new book of interest is The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms, by Elonka Dunin (Amazon US). Why post this on a page about Dan Brown you ask? Simple - Dunin is most well-known for her work in decoding the ciphers of James Sanborn, the creator of the Kryptos statue at C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia. As I point out in my book The Guide to Dan Brown's The Solomon Key (Amazon US), Sanborn and Kryptos are quite likely to play a part in Dan Brown's much-awaited sequel to The Da Vinci Code. Dunin confirms as much in this short interview. Interestingly, she also has a personal comment from Dan Brown about the one degree discrepancy between the co-ordinates coded into the dust-jacket of The Da Vinci Code (again, see my book if you don't know about this), and the actual location of Kryptos:

I've asked Dan Brown about that. He just says, "The discrepancy is intentional"...It points to the general location of CIA headquarters, about 150 feet southeast of the sculpture. His books are basically treasure hunts. I think he's planning to do that in Washington, D.C. One of the "go here, get a clue" is going to be, maybe, "Kryptos."

An interesting piece of extra information, ne c'est pas?

Heh. Another author using *my* book, to promote *his* book. Ah, the tangled web we weave...

Elonka :)

Elonka Dunin, Kryptos and Codes | The Cryptex - News on Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code and The Solomon Key

The first three parts of Kryptos' encoded message have been solved (although just last month sculptor James Sanborn alerted the world to a mistake he made, which changed the meaning a tad), and now fans are focused on deciphering part four. Elonka guesses that there isn't a prize associated with the solution, unlike in her new book, "The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms." Turns out, there's a puzzle hidden among the puzzles -- how meta, Elonka! -- and if you figure it out, she'll give you a little something. Thus far, no one's managed to crack it ...

And here's a link to the PDF of the actual article in today's tabloid "Washington Post Express." At least, it says on the main page that it's "A Publication of the Washington Post." The fact-checking and editing is a bit weak (My comments were heavily mis-quoted throughout the article, to the point of disseminating some false information), but at least I'm not being set up for anything truly outlandish, like breaking up Britney Spears' marriage or building a secret underground base with aliens or something. ;) Overall, it's "good" publicity - good pic, upbeat article, links to my site, spells my name right, and drops a hint about the meta-puzzle. No major complaints!

Elonka :)

Washington Post Express: Code Warrioress

If you've got some extra time today, get cracking on this: ?OBKRUOXOG HULBSOLIF BBWFLRVQQ PRNGKSSO TWTQSJQ SSEKZZWAT JKLUDIAWI NFBNYP VTTMZFP KWGDKZXTJC DIGKUHUAUEKCAR

It's the final, unsolved part of a coded sculpture known as Kryptos, and it's been driving cryptologists around the world batty for 16 years. The code is inscribed in a wavy 12-foot-high sculpture made of copper, granite and wood that contains thousands of encrypted characters. That it stands just outside the cafeteria of the CIA's headquarters, unsolved by some of the best cryptographers in the world, only adds to its mythology as one of the toughest codes in the world.

 . . .
For her day job, Dunin works for a St. Louis video-game developer. But cryptology has become an increasingly lucrative side hobby. She frequently lectures on the topic and has a book, "The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms."

For her, solving codes is more than just a way to kill time.

"It's a search for self knowledge - when I'm cracking a code, it gives me a better understanding of the world and a better understanding of myself."

I dunno about that "lucrative side hobby" part... So far all the costs involved with public speaking, like travel expenses, photography/makeup costs, and mailing supplies/postage to send out press copies, have put me in the red. But it's definitely been bringing fame, which may someday turn into actual income. We'll see. ;) The rest of the article is pretty good though!

Elonka :)

Hartford Courant: Uncrackable Code?

Show:AS IT HAPPENS
Date:2006/04/24
Time:17:30:01

For those who don't know, this is the Canadian version of NPR. In today's segment, I'm interviewed by Helen Mann about the Kryptos story. To listen, get "Part one", and the Kryptos segment starts at about the 20-minute mark.

I've been doing enough of these radio interviews now that I'm starting to make value judgments on good interviewers v. bad interviewers. ;) These folks are good ones. It was a fun interview, they were easy to work with, asked some good questions, and had an audio file of the segment up on their website almost immediately. "Thumbs up"!

Elonka :)

CanadaOne Radio - 'As It Happens'

All Things Considered, April 21, 2006 ? A sculptural cryptogram at the CIA's headquarters that has intrigued people for years may have flaws in its design, says its creator. For more than a decade, professional cryptologists and amateur code breakers have been trying to decipher Kryptos, an encrypted sculpture at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.
But it turns out that the artist made the challenge a bit more complicated than he intended. Melissa Block talks with James Sanborn, the sculptor who recently realized a mistake in the piece, and Elonka Dunin, a cryptologist who maintains a website on the sculpture.

Audio stream, for anyone who wants to listen to yesterday's "All Things Considered" segment. I had to grip my desk to keep my hands from shaking right before the segment, I was in such "fan-girl" mode. I was actually being interviewed by Melissa Block, wow!

Elonka :)

NPR : Enigmatic CIA Puzzle 'Kryptos' May Be Flawed