The CIA’s Infamous, Unsolved Cryptographic Puzzle Gets a ‘Final Clue’
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The CIA's Infamous, Unsolved Cryptographic Puzzle Gets a 'Final Clue':
The CIA's Infamous, Unsolved Cryptographic Puzzle Gets a 'Final Clue'
Almost exactly 30 years ago, the artist and sculptor Jim Sanborn was devising an encrypted code for his sculpture complex at the new CIA headquarters.
The centerpiece of the complex, called Kryptos, is an eight-foot tall sculpture of a copper scroll, with four paragraphs of letters cut from the metal. At first glance, the letters seem to be gibberish. But cryptologists, including NSA experts and the American scientist James Gillogly, gradually decrypted the first three paragraphs of the text. But the full solution has eluded cryptographers, and the 74-year-old Sanborn has just released a new clue in order to help hobbyists solve it.
[...] When the sculpture was made, amateur hobbyists took immediate interest in deciphering the encrypted text, which is itself riddlesome. The first out of four paragraphs, for example, has been decrypted to read, "BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION".
The fourth and final paragraph has, to this day, eluded all efforts at decryption. To the delight of cryptophiles everywhere, Sanborn has just released a new clue to the problem.
"I would prefer the piece to remain a secret indefinitely," Sanborn said. But at 74 years of age, the artist is getting older, and he wants hobbyists to at least have a shot at solving the puzzle that has vexed them so long.
With his new clue he has decoded a word that shows up early on in the fourth paragraph, now revealed to mean "NORTHEAST." In 2010 and 2014, he had revealed that two middle words "NYPVTT" and "MZFPK" decrypted to "BERLIN" and "CLOCK," respectively.
Understandably, the new clue has sparked a new flurry of people working on it. Chris Hanson, a software engineer and self-described nerd, helped cofound a long-standing forum for hobbyists interested in finding the Kryptos solution. Users on the forum such as "Monet Freidrich" have helped decrypt text from the sculpture. But Hanson thinks that the encryption that Sanborn developed for the fourth paragraph may be insurmountable, even with the new clue.
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