Whoo! I just got word that I've been accepted as one of the official speakers for this year's Def Con. :) (for those who don't know what Def Con is, it's a huge hacker/technology convention in Las Vegas that draws thousands of attendees from around the world) When I show up on the schedule, I'll meme it. As a sneak peek for the Memestreams community though, here's the abstract of the talk, which will be an updated version of what I presented at PhreakNIC. (thanks go to those that helped me with the wording!): Kryptos and the Cracking of the Cyrillic Projector Cipher
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In a courtyard at CIA Headquarters stands an encrypted sculpture called Kryptos. Its thousands of characters contain encoded messages, three of which have been solved. The fourth part, 97 or 98 characters at the very bottom, have withstood cryptanalysis for over a decade. The artist who created Kryptos, James Sanborn, has also created other encrypted sculptures such as the decade-old Cyrillic Projector, which was cracked last September by an international team led by Elonka Dunin. This talk is intended for a general audience with beginning to intermediate cryptographic experience. Elonka will go over how the code was cracked, and the current state of knowledge about the Kryptos sculpture, its own encrypted messages, and its mysterious CIA surroundings. Elonka at Def Con |
