When trying to solve a Kryptos solution, there’s really only one main assumed prediction, that the method you are using will solve the fourth part of Kryptos.
Nevertheless, it’s possible to take my hypotheses and try to make some reasoned predictions about each.
“Kryptos” is a plaintext artifact in the ciphertext
This one is simply right or wrong. I’ve attempted in several different ways to avoid the knowledge that there are several ways of actually spelling the word Kryptos in the text of K4. I am predicting that it is the most likely, the digraphs on the right side of the ciphertext with a “T” from the left of row 3 of K4. Is this certain? Not by any statistical means, it is rather an acknowledgement of the fact that I’m hoping it won’t disrupt the translation of the rest too badly to allow partial recovery. If I can even recover a 10+ letter fragment, it may be possible to go back and re-choose the letters used to remove “kryptos”. Why am I convinced that we need to remove it? It’s too coincidental that it can be easily noted. For what appears to be a secure cryptosystem for K4, the difficulty of coordinating plaintext and ciphering to allow the specific keyword “kryptos” to appear in the ciphertext would be significantly difficult.
Transposition has scrambled the digraphs
It is possible that the message was transposed first and then substituted. In this way, the ciphertext would hold little trace of the plaintext and would likely be very random and the frequency analysis would be nearly flat instead of muted. This is a hope and reasoning but not a certainty. It makes a stronger cryptosystem to fractionate and then diffuse so I will choose this as the most likely method that would have been used. If I fail miserably, this may be an area of alteration to revamp my methods. As for the type of transposition, it would not need to be exotic – a simple, standard transposition capable of splitting letter pairs would suffice.
A digraphic substitution ciphered the plaintext
Why digraphic? As I’ve already shown, neither transposition alone, simple substitution or polyalphabetic substitution would be enough to ensure K4′s security. Many of the known digraphic methods involve matrix enciphering and given Sanborn’s obvious predilections, these are almost certainly involved in Kryptos in some manner. By itself, a cipher of this kind is still vulnerable so it would need to be paired with another method. It is doubtful an unknown or strange digraphic system was used.
I predict that this will work.
What’s the point otherwise?
There’s more truth in this than you know (and that I can say at the moment). BTW, what do you think of one more step?
I’m not entirely opposed, this is mostly the best idea I can come up right now. I thought I’d start small and see how it goes.
What do you guys think of k4 being an artist’s cipher and not a mathematician’s cipher? The whole idea in information hiding is to be unpredictable otherwise it’s not very good hiding, right? Maybe that’s the ticket?
It’s possible that Sanborn made a unilateral last minute choice. The way he describes it is more as an artist (obviously) but he was had a vested interest in the overall experience solvers would go through as opposed to dry, linear ciphers. The question then becomes whether the answer is subjective or if despite his artful hiding we still get 97 letters of writing. I’m very inclined to think the ending is all Sanborn artistry.
An artist cipher? Like a drawing? Wouldn’t surprise me. Isn’t KRYPTOS itself supposed to represent a sheet of paper coming out of a printer? The two formats are landscape and portrait. Might have been too much for Sanborn to resist.
Of the ciphers I’ve encountered so far, there are three I could describe as visual. However, there is one of them in particular that is clearly something Sanborn would do. One thing that’s weird is the last clues I’m getting are pointing me away from the sculpture itself. I thought I understood what it means, but I’m not so sure anymore. I’m almost starting to think that K4 doesn’t contain any plaintext at all. That maybe the plaintext is outside of the sculpture itself.
Right now, what I’m finding troubling is how K4 is formatted. The way the information was stored is rather remarkable. With K2 and K3, there was only so much information that was doubly useful. But in K4, it’s all over the place. You could decode something one way and then reuse the same text and decode it a different way and you’d get a different clue. First off, I don’t rightly understand how you could pack that much info together but there’s already evidence of it in K2 with the X’s and QUEEN. Second, there doesn’t seem to be any place left to store the plaintext although at this point, it wouldn’t really surprise me if the plaintext was in there somewhere. Third, K4 is crafted specifically for Kryptos. So I’m not sure that Sanborn could change it without also completely destroying the clues stored within it.
I’m sure that Sanborn likely got into a debate with Ed Scheidt about the way he stored his clues. This could be part of what he wanted to change about the CIA’s way of thinking. The text that’s been discovered so far is just a front. It actually has nothing to do with the message. It’s just a bunch of characters that allows Sanborn to insert his clues into. Seriously, what’s the point of K3′s message? It’s a well known passage. Why would someone bother to encrypt that? And K2 might contains some clues, but I think the X’s was to be more obvious about it in that section. Really, K2 is non-sensical gibberish. Could it have deeper meaning? Sure. But I think it’s all about storing the clues. Something like a scavenger hunt where one item gives you leads on where to find the next item.
I think Sanborn possibly wanted to change their way of thinking by breaking the rules – playing a game. The rules are, “Okay, ladies and gentlemen of the CIA, your puzzle has been installed. You may now begin.”
The first few parts are solved and then time goes by and… nothing. Nothing at all. Years… ten, fifteen, twenty… nothing.
That was the plan. In order to solve this, their way of thinking (and ours) would have to change. We’d have to consider that maybe the true puzzle began when the commission was accepted. I think one layer of the story is about that. It’s about the game that was already being played and set into motion way back then. It also reflects on the idea that the game had already been ongoing before Sanborn came along. So it’s a continuum. The layers deal with the changes in perception at different times throughout history.