And the secret key is: puppy
Nah, it's always "swordfish".
The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale
31–40 of 59 posts
Re: The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale
#32“lies” is grammatically incorrect here. Shouldn’t it read “lays”?
Think "therein lies the rub"
Re: The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes a puzzle like this “unreasonable?” Like would it be a sort of “you had to know that you needed a bit of graffiti on a truck stop stall outside Anchorage” unfair scope issue or is there a different kind of unreasonable I cannot currently imagine?
A one time pad would be unreasonable. Edit: Unless the one time pad is a well known relative document, such as the Declaration of Independence.
There are SO many things he might have done, with no pre-determined rules. Like, algo-scramble.
Starting with the n-char plaintext, make it a loop. Now move the second letter two places to its right, the third three places, and so on ... until arriving at the original nth letter (painted red?) Or, starting with the digits of pi, move the second letter 3 to the right, the third 1, the fourth 4, und so weiter.
Doing a frequency on 97 weird letters wouldn't help much.
Re: The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably correct. Different from the other cyphers, the number of symbols is short, and correlating part of the plaintext that has been revealed gives poor measures for the full string length. It has been said that the other solutions are required to solve K4, so if the solution relies on something like character alignment, matrix coding or an even more convoluted permutation arrangement, this can look (or directly b…
Does it’s S shape, or the shadow it casts or any other physical representation of it have to do with the message?
Well, outside of Sanborn and his collaborators, who knows. When the puzzles were first revealed and people started trying to crack them, some of them explored out of the box approaches like the design of the sculpture, odd-shaped letters, shadows of the symbols, it's geographic position, etc. However eventually all first 3 turned out to be classic cryptographic algorithms (Vigenere for K1 and K2, transposition for K3), with the information to solve them contained within the cyphertext of the sculpture. For K4, Sanborn has hinted that this may not be the case.
Re: The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably correct. Different from the other cyphers, the number of symbols is short, and correlating part of the plaintext that has been revealed gives poor measures for the full string length. It has been said that the other solutions are required to solve K4, so if the solution relies on something like character alignment, matrix coding or an even more convoluted permutation arrangement, this can look (or directly b…
Does it’s S shape, or the shadow it casts or any other physical representation of it have to do with the message?
is it hinting at S-Box?
Re: The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale
#36Re: The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes a puzzle like this “unreasonable?” Like would it be a sort of “you had to know that you needed a bit of graffiti on a truck stop stall outside Anchorage” unfair scope issue or is there a different kind of unreasonable I cannot currently imagine?
It's easy to make a puzzle that's hard. "Guess the number in my head" is hard. It's not fun for the solver or reasonable. "Unscramble this text which was XORed with the Windows 3.1 solitaire EXE" is likewise. Good puzzles, even hard ones, should have some idea which way to approach them and should offer a method of attack other than brute force.
Here's an essay I wrote 15 years ago about another "unreasonable" puzzle:
Re: The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale
#38I've spent a fair amount of time on K4, and my conclusion is that it's simply a poor puzzle. At this point 24 of 97 characters have been revealed, and yet there's seemingly still not enough information pointing to how the known plaintext corresponds to the ciphertext. Over the decades everything reasonable has been tried and eliminated, which means the solution is likely to be unreasonable.
What makes a puzzle like this “unreasonable?” Like would it be a sort of “you had to know that you needed a bit of graffiti on a truck stop stall outside Anchorage” unfair scope issue or is there a different kind of unreasonable I cannot currently imagine?
Also, another example of an "unreasonable" challenge - the "Decipher Puzzle" https://cisa.umbc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/468/2017/09/S... -- from 1983 to 1985.
You would think that one of the lessons of that is that someone could jump in right at the end and solve it after several clues were released. That hasn't worked with K4, which is increasing people's skepticism.
Re: The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale
#391. Stand at first light: face EAST, then NORTHEAST. Let the BERLIN CLOCK choose; read where the shad 2. Make a narrow breach of light; hold still; as the edge moves, letters awaken and the sealed doorw 3. Four passes: hours, hour, minutes, minute. Read on each sweep; the rising sun will order what see
He is an artist, not a mathematician. It’s a physical reveal for this layer of the copper onion.
Re: The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale
#40[deleted]