Be sure to drink your Ovaltine
A crummy commercial? Sonofabitch.
An expression of his confidence that it won't be encrypt, as he was looking at the breakfast table for a phrase?
A New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: A New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture
#12I am inclined to believe that the 4th piece is written in a foreign language or otherwise multiply-encoded, or that Sanborn made a drastic error in the cryptography. The other 3 sections were solved independently in a much shorter time. For instance, the NSA was the first to crack the first three parts of the sculpture, and they did it in only 2 days. The fact that nobody has made any progress on the 4th section in w…
Apparently a mistake exists in Part 2 of the sculpture so it's plausible that there's more. From the Wikipedia article:
> There are also a few incorrect letters in the ciphertext which Sanborn has said were intentional, and a few letters near the beginning of the bottom half have been displaced from their normal positions, apparently intentionally... One of the lines of the tableau is one character too long, which Sanborn has indicated was accidental.
It's tough to imagine how to start such a problem when you can't even rely on the ciphertext being correct.
Re: A New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture
#13Personally, if I was the artist making such a sculpture, I would just use a one-time pad, use a key that's as long as the message, and burn my notes.
Then I would laugh maniacally at the brilliance of my troll for ever and ever.
Re: A New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture
#14I am inclined to believe that the 4th piece is written in a foreign language or otherwise multiply-encoded, or that Sanborn made a drastic error in the cryptography. The other 3 sections were solved independently in a much shorter time. For instance, the NSA was the first to crack the first three parts of the sculpture, and they did it in only 2 days. The fact that nobody has made any progress on the 4th section in w…
Apparently a mistake exists in Part 2 of the sculpture so it's plausible that there's more. From the Wikipedia article: > There are also a few incorrect letters in the ciphertext which Sanborn has said were intentional, and a few letters near the beginning of the bottom half have been displaced from their normal positions, apparently intentionally... One of the lines of the tableau is one character too long, which Sa…
If beating cryptanalysis just requires messing up a few letters, seems like a valid thing to do.
Re: A New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture
#15I am inclined to believe that the 4th piece is written in a foreign language or otherwise multiply-encoded, or that Sanborn made a drastic error in the cryptography. The other 3 sections were solved independently in a much shorter time. For instance, the NSA was the first to crack the first three parts of the sculpture, and they did it in only 2 days. The fact that nobody has made any progress on the 4th section in w…
Apparently a mistake exists in Part 2 of the sculpture so it's plausible that there's more. From the Wikipedia article: > There are also a few incorrect letters in the ciphertext which Sanborn has said were intentional, and a few letters near the beginning of the bottom half have been displaced from their normal positions, apparently intentionally... One of the lines of the tableau is one character too long, which Sa…
Unless, of course, those are clues? From the FAQ on Elonka's page:
Q: Why are words misspelled in Parts 1 and 2? Is that a mistake?
No. Sanborn has said that those two errors -- iqlusion and undergruund -- are deliberate, but he didn't say exactly why. He did say that it wasn't what they were that was so important, as their orientation or positioning.
If there's something critical about their positioning, and given that the coordinates are for a location in the same courtyard as the sculpture, it seems reasonable that one would need more than just the ciphertext to solve it.
Re: A New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture
#16Personally, if I was the artist making such a sculpture, I would just use a one-time pad, use a key that's as long as the message, and burn my notes. Then I would laugh maniacally at the brilliance of my troll for ever and ever.
Well in that case you might as well just scribble `head -c 1000 /dev/urandom | base32`.
Re: A New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture
#17I'm betting the whole thing ultimately just reads: "Hello, sweetie"
"Hello, world!" would be nice.
Re: A New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture
#18I am inclined to believe that the 4th piece is written in a foreign language or otherwise multiply-encoded, or that Sanborn made a drastic error in the cryptography. The other 3 sections were solved independently in a much shorter time. For instance, the NSA was the first to crack the first three parts of the sculpture, and they did it in only 2 days. The fact that nobody has made any progress on the 4th section in w…
Apparently a mistake exists in Part 2 of the sculpture so it's plausible that there's more. From the Wikipedia article: > There are also a few incorrect letters in the ciphertext which Sanborn has said were intentional, and a few letters near the beginning of the bottom half have been displaced from their normal positions, apparently intentionally... One of the lines of the tableau is one character too long, which Sa…
"It's tough to imagine how to start such a problem when you can't even rely on the ciphertext being correct."
That's a common problem in the real world. A lot of ciphertext, at least historically, comes from radio signals and if your receiver doesn't get a good copy of the signal you've got what you've got.
Re: A New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture
#19Personally, if I was the artist making such a sculpture, I would just use a one-time pad, use a key that's as long as the message, and burn my notes. Then I would laugh maniacally at the brilliance of my troll for ever and ever.
[deleted]
Re: A New Clue to Solve the CIA's Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture
#20I'm betting the whole thing ultimately just reads: "Hello, sweetie"
I'm sorry to see you got downvoted. That was a beautiful reference.
(Dr. Who for anyone who didn't get it)