Kryptos sculptor Jim Sanborn (and maybe I) will be on BBC Radio Five this afternoon (Friday) at 1:50 p.m. Eastern, for a 5-minute segment. I don't know yet if they'll have an audio file posted on the website afterwards, so here's a link to what will probably be the live stream, if anyone wants to try capturing it.

FYI,

Elonka :)

BBC - Radio Five Live - Kryptos

For more than a decade, amateur and professional cryptographers have been trying to decipher an encrypted sculpture that sits on the grounds of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Three-fourths of the sculpture has already been solved.

But now Jim Sanborn, the artist who created the Kryptos sculpture, says he made a mistake and a previously solved part of the puzzle that sleuths assumed for years was correct isn't.

Big big news: Everybody who thought they knew the answer to K2, check again. Instead of ending "...seconds west. ID by rows", the correct plaintext is "...seconds west. X Layer Two".

More details at our Kryptos Group announcement.

Heading back to watch the webcounter spin,

Elonka :)

Wired News: Kryptos Part 2 Was Wrong

April 17, 2006 — The recently arrested "boss of bosses" of the Sicilian Mafia, Bernardo Provenzano, wrote notes using an encryption scheme similar to the one used by Julius Caesar more than 2,000 years ago, according to a biography of Italy's most wanted man.
 . . .
The letter, written in January 2001 by Angelo Provenzano to his father, was found with other documents when one of Provenzano's men, Nicola La Barbera, was arrested

"...I met 512151522 191212154 and we agreed that we will see each other after the holidays...," said the letter, which included several other cryptograms.

"The Binnu code is nothing new: each number corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. "A" is 4, "B" is 5, "C" is 6 and so on until the letter Z , which corresponds to number 24," wrote Palazzolo and Oliva.

While the classic Caesar cipher moves everything three letters later (A becomes D, B becomes E, etc.), the "Provenzano code" assigns a number to each letter by simply increasing by 3 the value given to the 21 letters of the Italian alphabet listed in order.
So, A becomes 4 (1 3), B becomes 5 (2 3), C becomes 6 (3 3), etc
"In the Provenzano code the key is the 3 shift," mathematics expert Alessandro Martignago told Discovery News.

As the code is cracked, the "512151522 191212154" person becomes "Binnu Riina." Most likely, it refers to Bernardo Riina, arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of aiding Provenzano while he was on the run.

I got a letter from someone who said that Provenzano might have done better if he would have read my book first . . . ;)

Mafia Boss's Encrypted Messages Unraveled

Discover Magazine Issues may-06

This month's issue of Discover (May 2006, with the stars on the cover), also has a mention of me and my book, in the "Bogglers" gaming column.

Elonka :)

Discover Magazine - May 2006

She recently took time to discuss "Kryptos" and her new book, "The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms," a collection of more than 600 coded puzzles. Later this month, it will be sold in the United Kingdom as "The Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles."

Q&A about my new book, in the Sunday edition of St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Elonka :)

STLtoday - [Elonka Dunin] doesn't just write about codes -- she cracks them

The final Enigma code is taxing the network of computers
Online codebreaking enthusiasts working to solve a series of German World War II ciphers have cracked the second of three codes.
Thousands of users around the world have joined the M4 Project, using spare computing power to crack the codes.

Sort of like SETI, but on WWII ciphers.

BBC NEWS: Enigma project cracks second code

With worldwide sales of more than 40 million copies, including 4 million in Britain, The Da Vinci Code and its blend of conspiracy theories, shadowy secret societies and thrilling adventure has already spawned an industry of its own.
  . . .
“Disguised on the jacket of The Da Vinci Code, numerous encrypted messages hint at the subject matter of Dan Brown’s next Robert Langdon novel.”

A faint grid reference written in reverse on the cover leads, with an adjustment of one degree, to a sculpture called Kryptos in the courtyard of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Kryptos is covered in about 1,800 letters of code, much of which is still a mystery despite its location at the workplace of some of the world’s shrewdest cryptographers.

I wonder if the folks at the NSA cringe every time someone refers to the CIA as being the crypto agency. Or whether they see it a good "cover" for their own mission. ;)

UK Times Online: Codebreakers rack their brains to solve Dan Brown's new poser

I was so busy with my book, I completely missed this news as it went by . . .

November 8, 2005--A team at the German Federal Agency for Information Technology Security (BSI) recently announced the factorization of the 193-digit number

310 7418240490 0437213507 5003588856 7930037346 0228427275 4572016194 8823206440 5180815045 5634682967 1723286782 4379162728 3803341547 1073108501 9195485290 0733772482 2783525742 3864540146 9173660247 7652346609
known as RSA-640 (Franke 2005). The team responsible for this factorization is the same one that previously factored the 174-digit number known as RSA-576 (MathWorld headline news, December 5, 2003) and the 200-digit number known as RSA-200 (MathWorld headline news, May 10, 2005).

RSA numbers are composite numbers having exactly two prime factors (i.e., so-called semiprimes) that have been listed in the Factoring Challenge of RSA Security®.

While composite numbers are defined as numbers that can be written as a product of smaller numbers known as factors (for example, 6 = 2 x 3 is composite with factors 2 and 3), prime numbers have no such decomposition (for example, 7 does not have any factors other than 1 and itself). Prime factors therefore represent a fundamental (and unique) decomposition of a given positive integer. RSA numbers are special types of composite numbers particularly chosen to be difficult to factor, and they are identified by the number of digits they contain.

While RSA-640 is a much smaller number than the 7,816,230-digit monster Mersenne prime known as M42 (which is the largest prime number known), its factorization is significant because of the curious property that proving or disproving a number to be prime ("primality testing") seems to be much easier than actually identifying the factors of a number ("prime factorization"). Thus, while it is trivial to multiply two large numbers p and q together, it can be extremely difficult to determine the factors if only their product pq is given. With some ingenuity, this property can be used to create practical and efficient encryption systems for electronic data.

Gotta go update my "Unsolved Codes" webpage . . .

Elonka

MathWorld News: RSA-640 Factored

Checked images:3439950
Size of all files checked:61550089950
Total Interesting images:138050
Percentage Interesting images:02.160891307545227239

This is an open ended project to randomly stumble through the internet checking for steganography in images (basically hidden messages). Of course the best steganography is undetectable, but some common tools have shown to have statistical weaknesses that are detectable.

 . . .
The real work in checking the actual images has been done by Niels Provos, with stegdetect (which stegsearch requires), and you can see some analysis that he's done on Usenet, but the purpose here has been to audit images found on "random" websites.

A tidbit of data from someone doing research on steganography. Looks like they started but didn't really pursue it... Still, it's an interesting data point.

Steganography Stumbler

Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms (Paperback)
by Elonka Dunin

List Price:$13.95
Price:$11.16 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. See details
You Save:$2.79 (20%)

Availability: This item has not yet been released.

Heh, the manuscript's not even finished, and Amazon is already offering a discount on it. ;)

Books: Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms