Kryptos has been a fantastic puzzle. It may be solved within the next couple months or it might be a couple years but it will be solved.
I’ll probably always be interested but as far as pseudonymous blogging I will be leaving the “kryptosfan” moniker behind.
For the record, I think there’s a solution.
For posterity I leave this compilation of my efforts and some advice.
- Read online what you can about Kryptos
- Realize that none of these people have solved it either
- Read some books on cryptography. I would recommend The Code Book by Simon Singh or The Codebreakers by David Kahn.
- Learn about specific types of ciphers/codes.
- Encipher/encode a message by the types you learn.
- Learn about the cryptanalysis of those ciphers/codes.
- Try to crack your own message.
- Then try to modify the ciphering to foil attack.
- Use what you learn to work on the fourth part of Kryptos.
- Avoid K4 syndrome.
- Don’t give up.
As many before me have experienced, I’ve met some great people like Gary Phillips along the way and I’ve met some real douchebags as well. There’s crazies and there’s folks like msmagnolia.
For those interested in collaborations there’s the Yahoo groups and I would heartily recommend Bill Briere’s recent efforts to organize a concerted effort to break the last section (K4).
I may show up by a different name in the future but I will always be a
-Kryptosfan
I’ve decided to take a break.
Am I done with Kryptos? No. Am I done with this site? No.
I’m going to take some time to focus on my family and work. I’ll probably work on learning as much about cryptology as I can, read some books (click here for the reviews), and hope to come back to Kryptos with a fresh perspective and some new ideas.
I’ll be in and out. The last time I checked in was: 10/08/09
My Kryptos efforts lately have been reading as much as possible so most recent activity is in
I’m actually not having much luck finding what I need in the local bookstores and will need to try Amazon, etc.
Anyone got any good recommendations?
Quick thought to tickle the mind.
If Ed/Jim used something random to mask K4 then the letter frequencies would be random.
If it was user-defined algorithmic method then the letter frequencies would be less than random.
And K4 is…?
All this talk of stream ciphers and masking techniques has gotten me wondering.
Is it possible that Ed never meant for us to need clues to solve Kryptos? I would assume that he and Sanborn talked about leaving hints and clues throughout but I think Ed was smart enough to consider that some wouldn’t need them or find them or understand them.
I’m not saying there aren’t clues, just considering what they would have considered when planning.
So if our projected cryptanalyst approaches Kryptos he will rapidly translate the Morse code. He will then proceed into the courtyard and upon seeing the vigenere side and the ciphertext, quickly get to work cracking the first part, then the second and the third. For someone breaking the code, it quite often doesn’t matter much what it actually says so it’s possible that a trained analyst could defeat Kryptos up to this point. S(he) would get to K4 and probably assume a cipher that masks letter frequencies.
Here’s where we take a time-out and think about things.
If there are clues that are too explicit then Kryptos was a joke that anyone could figure out. Anyone who’s done some background work will get the sense that it was meant for entertainment but not as a joke. So we get some clues that hint around at things, but nothing too specific.
Let’s go back to our analyst, Ed would know that just a masking method would be too easy so he ciphered Sanborn’s text and then masked it. Solve the masking and then you still have the ciphertext. Put yourself in his shoes, would you make the cipher so ridiculously hard that it would take a lot of time to solve it. No way. Why? If you make the ciphertext too hard then an analyst would never know if they’d solved the masking method or not.
“Ahhh”, you interject, “but the clues!”.
If, and this is a big if, Ed planned it out for a typical code-, cipher-breaking analyst he would not have depended upon the context of the plaintext to help us solve the rest. This is why I’d make the argument that the underlying ciphertext will be identifiable in some way as to let us know either by frequency analysis or by some other means that we’ve made it through.
Without this assumption it would be fairly easy to decipher with numerous sequential methods until you’re convinced you can finally crack it with just one more…
How would you ever know when you’ve broken through and have obtained the ciphertext?
It’s an argument that smacks of teleology but right or wrong, it’s worth a couple minutes to consider it.
This isn’t as weird an idea as I had anticipated would crop up in my efforts to solve K4. It’s also not something I would have imagined four months ago.
It’s on par with a one-time pad or stream cipher but is more simplistic because the algorithm is well known and relatively easy to derive.
Take the digits of pi and use modular arithmetic on the K4 letters-as-digits. Take the resulting numbers and convert them back to letters. Take those letters and do a little frequency analysis, a little simple substitution and see what you get.
It gets a bit wordy but if you skip halfway through it might help.
It also didn’t work out as smashingly well as I’d hoped.
I like the idea though and may try it again with some different simple PRNG’s.
This will simultaneously make no sense to anyone and plenty of sense to everyone.
Nothing is sacred online, and increasingly in offline matters, as far as the concept of copyright and intellectual property. Despite recent lawsuits it will likely remain this way for some time. I think this is better than the alternative.
That being said, there aren’t really that many people with online material about Kryptos and even if it’s not someone who directly builds a site then it will be the inevitable trickle of interested parties keeping tabs on material relating to Kryptos. Anybody reading this particular post will have already waded through a plethora of copy/paste sites and meaningless half paragraphs that start with the origin of the name Kryptos from the greek.
This is not to say that multiple people can’t come up with the same idea or see the same thing. This is about plagiarism.
It’s very possible that after filtering around online long enough for one to get an idea buried in the memory that reappears later as “original”. The concept of memetics explores this very process well. That’s unintentional and sometimes hard to consciously note, that’s also not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about plagiarism.
If you’ll note, in the two short paragraph above, I linked to a webpage about plagiarism and an article in Wikipedia that describes memetics. This is how to note a citation or reference for your reader. I’m not always that great at this and sometimes I just hint that I’ve stolen some description from Wikipedia or just have a link out to someone else’s site. All the same, it’s not enforceable.
So how do social people with offline customs and morality come to grips with online plagiarism? They accept the fact that as passionate and inflamed as they get, there’s not much they can do about it. Some folks like to retaliate and others post flaming rants.
I resort to a carefully employed apathy.
There’s not a whole lot I can do and in such a narrow field as “folks who like to read/think/work on Kryptos”, it becomes obvious to one’s peers when someone has acquired another’s ideas without giving credit where credit is due. I have a hearty expectation that there are at least three people who would bear down on me with appropriate derision and disapprobation if I did this.
If I’ve done this, now is a great time to let me know…
I would be disappointed if someone simply did a copy/paste on anything I’ve written and then claim it for their own without getting it to work a little better than I did. To take a concept and actually execute it more poorly than a simple copy/paste is deplorable. I think I’d be interested and a little proud to see someone take inspiration from anything I’ve had a hand in and make it fantastic. To see the reverse is disappointing and more than a little depressing.
Observations: Morse code, K1, K2, K3 solved without any clues or keywords and virtually independent of each other. This is due to well-developed cryptanalytic methods that render their ciphers vulnerable. In WWII there might be multiple messages encoded by the same cryptosystem but they would still be stand-alone ciphertexts nonreliant upon external clues. In Kryptos there has been a lot of speculation and about a bajillion people shrieking that they’ve found the clues that everyone has been ignoring but still K4 is unsolved.
Postulate: We’d be better off trying to solve K4 by isolating it from Sanborn’s ambiguous plaintext.
Ramifications: By approaching it from a historically consistent perspective we could remove quite a bit of the confusion and bad analysis.
Potential Pitfalls: Many have suggested the possibility that K4 requires the use of other portions of Kryptos text, by removing these from analysis we would face the risk of not being able to solve it.
Addressing Pitfalls: Despite many claims to the contrary, the other texts of Kryptos haven’t assisted anyone in completing a solution of K4 that has passed muster. This devolves the argument to a me vs. you situation with both sides having equal claims.
I expect that Jim thinks he’s left us a bunch of hints and clues and I know many folks who have found enough clues to occupy them for the rest of their efforts on Kryptos. I also know that I, personally, find the texts to be interesting but mostly useless so far. Yes, I know this is blasphemy. I’m the same person who could never see the pictures in those dot-pictures that you were supposed to relax your eyes to see. Maybe the two are connected, if I could just relax my brain…
I just figured this was a weirdly practical thing to suggest and wanted to post it for posterity.
“The voice of reason is more to be regarded than the bent of any present inclination; since inclination will at length come over to reason, though we can never force reason to comply with inclination.” – Joseph Addison
“Wise men are instructed by reason; men of less understanding, by experience; the most ignorant, by necessity; and beasts, by nature.” – Cicero
What does reason tell us about K4? If we take in the nature of the ciphertext and the things we can learn from the interviews with the creators, what do we find?
It tells us there are some things that K4 cannot possibly be, at least before the masking technique has been solved.
- Simple substitution, i.e. monographic monoliteral substitution of any kind or of any complexity or any combination of such up to an infinite number applied consecutively
- Transposition alone of any kind or complexity
- a Vigenere cipher
- Digraphic substitution because 97 is an odd number
- A system that allows irregular CT to PT exchange, basically anything that changes the number of letters unless there’s a clever manipulation of plaintext to allow the same final number of letters.
- A one-time pad because if used correctly it would be impossible to solve
- A stream or block cipher because they are very difficult if not impossible to solve with one example, that is very small, and not using a computer but they also represent much more modern ciphering systems than were to be used in K4. Conceivably one could argue their use would compromise systems in use at that time which the CIA forbade Scheidt from doing.
- Anything other than “pencil-and-paper” ciphers
- It’s probably not in code (code as in letter or words representing words/sentences/messages not to be confused with ciphers)
- It’s not an anagram
- A literal application of K3 directions to K4 text, please reference John Wilson’s site
- It’s probably not an overlay of the cipher side on the vigenere tableau because that is more likely a possibility for after K4 has been solved.
- It is not unsolvable by intent, that goes completely against the point of the piece
There’s quite a few things it can’t be, what is still possible?
- Something else
- Something I don’t know of or haven’t considered
- Something invented specifically for Kryptos
- Something Ed came up with and Jim changed after the fact
- Steganography followed by a known cipher method (trick answer, this is exactly what it is)
- A method similar to a Castor cipher (Something I came up with)
- Fractionated Morse Cipher
- It could use a non-English language during the ciphering which can then be translated into English, the challenge here is maintaining letter count
- Something absolutely bizarre and crazy, although this is unlikely
- A multiple step ciphering method, probably not that many steps though
- It’s still possible that there is a keyword message or means of retrieving the keys for each part that has yet to be found
- It’s still possible to solve K4, even if Sanborn screwed it up
I’ve tried a lot of different things and been heavily influenced by traditional ciphering methods.
One thing I’ve come to realize is that the masking method used on K4 is not part of a traditional ciphering system. It is probably influenced by them and it’s extremely, extremely likely that behind the mask of K4 lies a well-known cipher system that will potentially be challenging but will not likely last 20 years. Does this mean throw caution to the wind and work on our “magic unicorn cipher” theories? No. Can you be completely and absolutely sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s not some known system? No. Maybe I used the wrong keywords, maybe it’s 98 letters, maybe I didn’t try each and every single traditional cipher method. Would I bet money that the mask is not a traditional cipher method? Yes. How good do you feel about this? Very good. Good enough to suggest to everyone who may read this that they too should give up on standard cipher methods as a means to un-mask K4? Yes. Is it probable that K4 is not a single cipher algorithm cryptosystem? Yes, it very probably uses a non-traditional but rational means of masking a known ciphersystem.
Where do we go from here?
If I was to give unasked for advice, I would recommend two things
- Work to find the keywords to at least K1 and K2 while hopefully elucidating the keys/hints to each part of Kryptos which will give us the clues specific to K4.
- Seek to find well-reasoned and rational possible single-step methods for the masking technique that change letter frequency and can be reversed.
Am I giving up? No.
Do I regret all the time I’ve put into the areas I’ve focused on? No.
Is it possible the keywords can be retrieved by some traditional cipher method? Yes.
Do I think we need to be there to solve K4? No, though probably to solve the final riddle it will be necessary.
Why does it seem that so many people have tried and failed? Where did they go wrong? How can we solve it if they failed? We have failed to this point through inexperience, through pursuing methods that have no chance of working, through a lack of time, through a lack of focus, through a lack of sanity, through a lack of interest. There are surges of interest in Kryptos and then it ebbs as a lot of smart people consider the problem, give it a try, fail and give up. There’s also a lot of dumb people that try Kryptos or crazy people who try Kryptos. Sometimes it’s hard to put someone specifically in just one of those categories. All it’s going to take is a sane, creative, intelligent person to put all the pieces together and figure out the steps needed to solve the fourth part and the rest. That could be you but I rather hope it will be me too.
I wish everyone good luck and I hope to keep my reason and wits about me as I step off the path and pursue things a little less traditional…
While contemplating Kryptos, I was trying to think of ciphering schemes that could enable one to mask the frequency counts. Don’t we have enough traditional methods that we don’t need to go inventing others? Oh yeah, definitely but it’s not like knowing about them has helped us with K4 though, has it? This is a method I came up with:
It might have enough similarities to something Ed Scheidt could have done that I’d be interested in trying to break K4 in a similar fashion. Problem is, I don’t really know how. It’s just a pencil-and-paper cipher so it can’t really be all that hard so I thought I’d have a little contest:
Here’s the ciphertext:
CAIZ
NMSIDVOHMCROUTDJENUFNAPOWTQUNTA
TLEXCRKREHDSOIEATNBTSREMTORPGQE
NLOBSELRAOGTAAELCRREEIKGSESCAPYA
All the information you’ll need are in the two links above. It’s simply a modified substitution scheme with nothing else tossed in to make it worse – no transpositions or vigeneres to solve. It’s in the correct order but I removed punctuation because I didn’t want to make it too easy and because K4 doesn’t have any.
I’ll be curious to see if anyone can break it.
