The Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters has 4 sections of code on it. The first three have been solved. In 1999 there was a big media splash as Jim Gillogly announced his solution, which had been obtained via a computer attack. Part 4 (the last 97 characters) is as yet unsolved.

I wish I could say that I'd solved Part 4, but I haven't (yet). What I *did* do this week though, was come up with a new solution technique for part 3 which I believe to be the "pencil and paper" method that the original authors of the sculpture intended to be used. It's a way of eyeballing the code, such that anyone with access to the ciphertext ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/july99/kryptoscode19.htm ) could quickly make a grid and check the letters off to get the entire message. -- no elaborate mathematical formulae or number-crunchers required.

I've written to Gillogly and a couple other cryptographers to check my work. If anyone else would like to take a look in the meantime, I've got a page describing the technique which is posted at my Kryptos site:

Elonka's Solution to Part 3 of Kryptos

] An international group of cryptographers, the Kryptos
] Group, announced this week that the decade-old Cyrillic
] Projector Code has been cracked, and that it deciphers to
] some classified KGB instructions and correspondence.
]
] The Cyrillic Projector is an encrypted sculpture at the
] University of North Carolina in Charlotte, that was
] created by Washington DC artist James Sanborn in the
] early 1990s. It was inspired by the encrypted Kryptos
] sculpture that Sanborn created two years earlier for CIA
] Headquarters.
]
] The message on the Cyrillic Projector has turned out to
] be in two parts. The decrypted first part is a Russian
] text encouraging secret agents to psychologically control
] potential sources of information. The second part appears
] to be a partial quote from classified KGB correspondence
] about the Soviet dissident Sakharov, with concerns that
] his report to the Pugwash conference was being used by
] the Americans for an anti-Soviet agenda.

Press Release: The Cyrillic Projector Code Has Been Solved

] Frustrated after months of trying to solve Kryptos.................

Heh. This is the page of one of the other cryptographers who's working on Kryptos. He created a 3D model of the sculpture, and then imported it into a Half-Life engine so that he could take a crowbar to it. Scroll down to the bottom to see the screenshots. I kinda sympathize.... ;)

Kryptos and crowbars

From Elonka:

While I was giving my talk at CIA Headquarters in October, I managed to obtain some rubbings of the mysterious Kryptos sculpture in the main courtyard. Three of the four encoded sections on that sculpture have been cracked, but the last 97 characters are still unsolved. If this is something you're interested in working on, check this link for more information about the sculpture, as well as scans of the rubbings that I did.

CIA Kryptos Sculpture

As part of my research into Kryptos and the other works of its sculptor, James Sanborn, I have been having art galleries all over the country send me copies of their files, with information that I can add to my James Sanborn webpage (http://www.elonka.com/kryptos/sanborn.html).

A few weeks ago, I received a couple envelopes with a complete set of copies of the files from a section of the Smithsonian Archive. These were from a series of "Jim Sanborn" folders, which had been received from one of his prior agents, the Nancy Drysdale Art Gallery.

As I dug through the files, I found a lot of the usual stuff: price lists, articles, pictures, exhibition catalogs and whatnot, but then ran across something that I *wasn't* expecting to see: A classified KGB document!

It appears to be a document from 1982, about the Soviet dissident Sakharov. There was no explanation as to why the document was in those art gallery files. My speculation is that perhaps Sanborn received some KGB documents from the CIA when he was doing work there, and he gave them to his agent to have translated. Perhaps some extra copies of the document got lost in the paper shuffle somewhere, and when they resurfaced, they were identified as, "Oh yeah, that's for Sanborn, put it in his file" and then they were forgotten?

My favorite theory is that the cyrillic from the KGB document may give a clue to the plaintext of Sanborn's encrypted Cyrillic Projector. Especially because that ciphertext is also on Sanborn's Antipodes sculpture, and Sanborn was quoted as saying that the cyrillic side was about "KGB Operations".

I also have to admit that I was amused by the formal language of the KGB document. For example, it ends with a final paragraph which reads, "As a result of measures taken, the hostile plans of the adversary have been foiled." So now I and my friends are using that line in daily speech. Like if we go to a restaurant and argue about what to get on the menu, someone will call out, "The hostile plans of the adversary have been foiled!" :)

Enjoy,

Elonka :)

KGB Document in the Sanborn Files

The CIA has updated their website with a Flash video about Kryptos. It's got several new close-up photos, which is good, but the rest of the info is awful. They are still reproducing errors in the transcript from the old version of the website, and their historical information is appalling. It's particularly irritating considering that I've written to them several times to inform them about the errors over the years, and they still haven't fixed things.

For an example of an error, look at the transcript of Panel 4 on the CIA website. It ends "E F G H I J". The line actually ends with an "L", not a "J". Check Gillogly's pic to confirm for yourself. Or check my website transcript which is easy enough to copy/paste, and has been extensively checked and double-checked and triple-checked by the folks in the Kryptos group. I'm also unhappy about the historical information on the CIA site, like where they say that Sanborn created the artwork in collaboration with a popular fiction writer. No, he didn't. That was a plan from before he started working on the sculpture, but it never actually happened. And Sanborn has confirmed that it didn't happen. And my Kryptos FAQ covers this point as well.

Our tax dollars at work... (grumble) And this is supposed to be an intelligence agency. Sorry, this doesn't make me sleep better at night. Yes, I've had reps from the CIA contact me and say, "Well look, this means that we're concentrating on our main mission, and not on the artwork around the building." But sorry, that doesn't cut it. If the CIA can't even produce accurate information about THE SCULPTURE THAT'S IN THE MIDDLE OF THEIR OWN BUILDING, how the heck can we trust them to provide accurate information about anything else in the world??

Argh.

Elonka

Kryptos Flash video at CIA website

I got word from one of the producers that my website will be mentioned on this show, sometime in February. I don't have an exact date yet, but will post here when I find out.
Elonka :)

Update: The (very brief) Kryptos segment will be on tomorrow :

Date: Saturday, February 24, 2007
Channel: CourtTV
Show: Saturday Night Solution (during/between Forensic Files / Body of Evidence)

As a heads-up, "Saturday Night Solution" isn't really a "show" so much, as a theme on Saturdays. Or in other words, you can't specifically TiVo it. ;) The way it seems to work, is that there are two hosts throughout the evening, who chatter during commercial breaks and offer other tidbits of information about private detectives or spy equipment or, in this case, on secret codes.

I don't know exactly in which break that they'll be talking about Kryptos, but my best guess is that it will be in the break between the two shows "Forensic Files" and "Body of Evidence" on Saturday evening.

There will also be a longer segment on Kryptos coming up this summer, on the PBS program "Nova." (Specifically, NovaScienceNow) I'll post more info on the exact date, as soon as I hear anything.

And for anyone who misses the CourtTV segment, I'll have a mirror up on my personal site later, probably at http://www.elonka.com/elonkanews.html .

FYI,

Elonka :)

The BBC Radio segment aired on their Tuesday morning -- the "Pods & Blogs" segment on Five Live.

In terms of interviewers, I was actually quite disappointed in them. In fact, of all the radio shows I've been on, BBC Radio was clearly the worst, which surprised and saddened me, since I'd thought better of BBC.

Their producer initially contacted me about doing a segment with James Sanborn on Friday afternoon. They scheduled a time, but ended up calling us late, and then when we went on the air, we each got to say just one or two sentences, and then the interviewer interrupted us with, "Sorry, out of time, and I'm not understanding this anyway," and they cut us off and ended the segment rather suddenly.

To the producer's credit, he sent me a letter of apology later in the day. And for what it's worth, I was able to learn from the mistakes of the BBC segment, in order to make the later NPR segment even better, so I thanked the BBC producer for that, and he offered to try again on Monday, with what was implied to be a longer segment about my book (which is coming out in the UK on Thursday).

So I agreed to the second segment, but again, they ran late with previous programming, kept sending me emails saying, "Just a few more minutes", and then when they *did* call, I found out that it was going to be for a pre-recorded segment instead of live. Further, I found out that they now wanted me to be the caller in a two-DJ "make fun of the caller" segment. But I adapted to that and we managed to have a more or less fun time with it.

Then when I asked them when the segment was going to air, they said, "In a couple hours" and that they'd contact me and tell me when, but they never did (I found out after the fact that it aired several hours after we recorded it). So then I went looking for it on the BBC website to find out if I could listen to the recording, but couldn't find any audio file, and their site looks weeks out of date.

So I wrote to the producer, and he apologized and sent me a link of where the show could be found. The audio file is there, but there's no program description so it's not searchable. Further, I'm told that it's only going to be there for a week, and then it's going to be deleted!

So, I had a big "thumbs down" for BBC at the moment. But, the segment came out okay, if you don't mind the silly humor and them mispronouncing my name. And they did at least mention my book.

For anyone who wants to listen to it before it gets deleted, go to this link, click on "Latest Pods & Blogs", and that should start up the BBC Radio Player on the lefthand side. If you're using a compatible browser (IE yes, Firefox probably not, and not sure about Mac), you can use the arrows to fast forward to just past the "18:10" mark, to listen to the 10-minute Kryptos segment.

And if BBC Radio ever calls and asks you to be on one of their programs, be warned.

(2-May-2006 update: The stream is now offline, but a mirror can be located here)

BBC Radio: Pods & Blogs (and Kryptos, oh my!)

] What does it say about the Central Intelligence Agency
] that its agents can crack the secret codes of enemy
] nations but can't unravel a coded sculpture sitting
] outside their cafeteria window?

] This is good news to Elonka Dunin, an executive producer
] and manager at Missouri gaming company Simutronics, who
] is obsessed with cracking Kryptos and thinks that the
] more people who work on the puzzle the quicker they'll
] solve it.
]
] "We have lots of different theories that we're chasing
] down," Dunin said of her band of sleuths, which includes
] some CIA employees. "But there's no way we'll know
] whether we're on the right track until something comes
] loose."

Elonka and Kryptos is currently featured in a front page story in Wired.

Wired News: Solving the Enigma of Kryptos

Update: Various photographers (some who wish to remain anonymous) have been sending me pictures of the Antipodes sculpture at the Hirshhorn.

For those who have been following the story in my blog, this sculpture was particularly intriguing because it appeared to have the complete text of the Kryptos sculpture upon it, *and* the complete text of the Cyrillic Projector, and an additional 20% or so of other ciphertext in both languages.

It was my hope that perhaps there was extra text on the English side which would shed a clue towards cracking Kryptos. As it turned out, there *is* some additional ciphertext on the Cyrillic side, which does not appear anywhere on the Cyrillic Projector. On the English side though, it is just a mix and repeat of the code sections that are already on the Kryptos sculpture.

It's still useful though, because it is reassuring to see that Part IV is exactly the same length on Antipodes, as it is on Kryptos. There'd been some speculation that Kryptos part IV might only be the first part of a lengthier code, with the rest of the ciphertext "sucked into the whirlpool", but Antipodes seems to show that this is not the case.

Pics are now online, along with some additional info about the sculpture. Big hugs and thanks to all you anonymous photographers out there! :)

Sanborn's Antipodes Sculpture