The encrypted inscription on the Kryptos sculpture is one of the most famous crypto mysteries in the world. Recently, a TV documentary about Kryptos was made. Here’s my making-of report.
The encrypted inscription on Kryptos, a sculpture located in the central courtyard of the CIA building in Langley, Virginia, is the world’s most famous crypto puzzle and one of the most notable crypto mysteries in existence.
Kryptos
While the first three parts of the Kryptos inscription have been broken, the fourth part (K4) is still unsolved. K4 looks like this:
OBKR
UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO
TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP
VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR
Kryptos, a sculpture made of stone and copper, was created by US artist Jim Sanborn in 1989. As it is not accessible to the public, only very few of the many Kryptos enthusiasts have seen the original of the sculpture. Only about ten photographs of it could be found online, including the following:
Source: Jim Sanborn/CC Licence Attribution Share-alike 3.0 Unported
Meanwhile, Sanborn has revealed that the two words BERLIN and CLOCK appear in K4 as follows:
OBKR
UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO
TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBber
linclockWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR
In spite of these clues, nobody has been able to decipher K4 so far.
The TV documentary
Considering the huge interest Kryptos has created over the last two decades, it comes as no surprise that CNN has decided to produce a TV documentary about it. It goes without saying that Elonka Dunin, the world’s leading Kryptos expert (I’m sure, she knows even more about Kryptos than its creator Jim Sanborn himself) plays the leading role in it. I don’t yet know when the documentary will air, but Elonka told me some interesting items that were learned during the filming.
The filmmaking took place during the first March weekend in three parts: one in Langley, Virginia, on the grounds of CIA itself, one in Elonka’s home in Rockville, Maryland, and one in Jim Sanborn’s studio in Piney Point, Maryland. At Langley, Elonka Dunin and Ed Scheidt were allowed entrance. For Elonka, this was only the second time she has seen Kryptos, with the first one being 17 years ago. In the Maryland portions of the documentary filmmaking, several other Kryptos aficionados took part:
- Richard SantaColoma is a friend of mine and a reader of this blog
- Denny McDaniels, whom I have met at the NSA Crypto History Symposium, was a member of a group that solved the first three Kryptos parts
- Ed Scheidt, whom I have met several times at Kryptos gatherings, was Sanborn’s cryptography consultant for the Kryptos sculpture
- Mike Godwin is the inventor of Godwin’s law
- Carl Ellis has taken part in several Kryptos meetings I attended.
- Bob Bogart is a talented cryptanalyst I have never met. I hope, Elonka will introduce me to him at the next NSA Crypto History Symposium.
And finally, Jim Sanborn himself played an important role in the documentary. The production company is named Great Big Story, which is owned by Turner/CNN.
Elonka and Richard have provided me a number of photographs. The following one shows Kryptos creator Jim Sanborn in his studio during the filmmaking:
Source: Richard SantaColoma
Apart from Kryptos, Sanborn has created a few more sculptures with long inscriptions, some of which are encrypted. The most famous one is the Cyrillic Projector. In Sanborn’s studio a few more of this kind can be seen:
Source: Richard SantaColoma
Elonka wrote: “Jim’s studio was full of all sorts of goodies. Various shapes and sizes of Kryptos miniatures, plus samples of artwork from all other parts of his career: Atomic Time, Covert Obsolescence, projected light photographs, and his newest work about the black market sculpture trade in Cambodia.”
Richard SantaColoma wrote about the following picture: “Great sushi lunch, hosted by Elonka and the film crew. I worry that some of the eating process might be in the final product! Elonka, Mike Godwin, Sanborn, Bob Bogart, Ed Scheidt, and with his back turned, Denny McDaniels.”
Source: Richard SantaColoma
Elonka wrote: “We plied everyone with sushi and munchies and chatted for hours while the crew filmed away, then they kicked most of us out so they could do about 45 minutes just with Jim, then they spent more time getting various shots, such as one of the cameramen went outside to get a shot through the windows of Jim looking at some of his crypto (Cyrillic) matrices.”
Here’s Jim Sanborn with the film crew:
Source: Richard SantaColoma
Mike Godwin, Jim Sanborn’s wife Jae Ko, Ed Scheidt, and Carl Ellis:
Source: Richard SantaColoma
New Kryptos photographs
Elonka wrote about her Kryptos visit (the second one in all her life): “Escorted in by multiple people, and had some interesting chats with members of the Media Relations and Public Affairs departments, they were eager to talk about Kryptos. We spoke briefly about “the envelope” (an envelope which Sanborn said contained the answer, and that he handed to Director William Webster during the Kryptos dedication ceremony) and where it might be now. I spent nearly an hour in the gift shop, spending waaaay too much money, but then again, I’m not regretting a penny of it! The high point of the day for me was as we were walking past the cafeteria, and I knew I was getting closer to seeing Kryptos again! The first thing I noticed was that there’s a new concrete plaza in the semi-circle that Sanborn designed. The plaza doesn’t go as far as the duck pond, nothing of that part of the sculpture was disturbed. Approaching the duck pond area, I was excited to see that the pond is drained for the winter. I looked closely but saw nothing inside of interest, just the normal pump/filtration items. There were some extra rocks here and there which seemed to be placed to hide the pump lines.”
Elonka took the chance to take over 1,000 pictures of the sculpture. However, she was only allowed to photograph Kryptos itself, not the place around it. Here are a few photographs Elonka provided me:
Source: Elonka Dunin
Source: Elonka Dunin
Source: Elonka Dunin
The pictures Elonka took might be used to build a Kryptos model. I hope, it will be a little more detailed than the following one:
Source: Schmeh
Notes from the meeting
Here are a few notes Elonka took during her meeting with Jim Sanborn:
- When asked whether it was necessary to know the solutions to K1-K3 in order to solve K4, Jim said no.
- When asked about the solutions that have been sent to him, and whether any of them were close, Jim said he got one from Germany about a year ago that was “kind of scary”, that the first part had started to look right, but then the rest didn’t.
- Jim made it clear that encrypting Kryptos was something he did decades ago, and he’s done his best to actively forget it. Forget the plaintext, forget the methods.
- It’s not necessary to have a particular book to solve K4, just “to be able to read”.
- We spent quite a bit of time asking Jim about the correlation between the plaintext BERLIN and the ciphertext such as NYPVTT. Specifically, we were trying to find out if there was a 1:1 relationship from NYPVTT to BERLIN, or there was some other step, the masking technique. Jim was confused when we mentioned masking technique, evidently it’s something that Ed said that Jim didn’t understand. Jim said that yes the ciphertext and plaintext were connected, but when I tried to explain what exactly we were asking, like that in K1 EMUFPH is exactly BETWEE, but in K3 ENDYAH does not map exactly to SLOWLY, Jim backed off and said he would only commit to the fact that K4 is exactly 97 characters long, and that BERLIN is plaintext that starts at exactly the 64th character, but he wouldn’t go further than that.
The most important news Elonka published is the following: Jim Sanborn said he’s going to offer another clue (in addition to BERLIN and CLOCK) in 2019 and that this would be “the last one”. I can hardly wait.
Follow @KlausSchmeh
Further reading: The Top 50 unsolved encrypted messages: 4. Kryptos
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13501820
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/763282653806483/
Kommentare (32)