Sculptor Gives a Hint For CIA's Kryptos 151
omega_cubed writes "The New York Times reports that Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created the wavy metal pane called Kryptos that sits in front of the CIA in Langley, VA, has gotten tired of waiting for code-breakers to decode the last of the four messages. 'I assumed the code would be cracked in a fairly short time,' [Sanborn] said, adding that the intrusions on his life from people who think they have solved his fourth puzzle are more than he expected. So now, after 20 years, Mr. Sanborn is nudging the process along. He has provided The New York Times with the answers to six letters in the sculpture's final passage. The characters that are the 64th through 69th in the final series on the sculpture read NYPVTT. When deciphered, they read BERLIN."
Poor Cryptographer? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat (Score:5, Insightful)
Germans are incredibly tolerant about their language; if you try to speak it they will lend helping hands. I guess they figure that if you have the courage to try to learn it, and speak it, you don't need to prove any valour beyond that. (German is not my first language).
I have seen the film clip where Kennedy says, "Ich bin ein Berliner!", but all of the crowd knew what he wanted to say, and so it was no problem.
Re:What's sad/scary about this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing sad about this. It just illustrates that cryptanalysis is very hard when there's not enough context.
In other words, you too can keep your messages secret for 20 years if you (1) keep your messages short and seemingly random, and (2) don't reuse the same cypher.
The three letter agencies have a better chance of decoding the Voynich manuscript than this statue, simply because there's more to analyze in the manuscript.
Why try? (Score:1, Insightful)
Nothing sad about this. It just illustrates that cryptanalysis is very hard when there's not enough context.
Not only that, but there's little incentive to solve these cyphers. It's not like he's hiding a Swiss bank account or ICBM launch codes.
The best a cracker could expect would be some kudos and maybe a job offer.
Not something anyone is going to spend supercomputer time on or build a botnet to crack.
Re:First time, eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, "ich bin ein Berliner" is not wrong. The creative re-interpretation of JFK's words rests solely on the fact that "Berliner" is also the name for those jelly-filled doughnuts. If he had given the speech in München (Munich) and had said, "Ich bin ein Münchner", nobody would have thought to make anything more of it.
Re:It's the CIA guys. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not just better, but also more appropriate. The NSA and its purposes have been corrupted; best that it go away entirely.
And the CIA is a factory which produces rainbows and puppies?
Re:What's sad/scary about this... (Score:3, Insightful)
A large part of the problem is that the sculptor wasn't meticulous enough, and introduced _errors_ to the cyphertexts. That makes the decryption all the more complicated, because you have to brute-force all the possible errors he could have made and try each of them against your proposed solution. For a linear encryption scheme, you can find out where the errors are and cut down on the time, but for a matrix type encryption, even if you had the key and the cipher, you will get gibberish out with a single typo or left out character.
Re:just wondering (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. The greatest fool can ask a question that the wisest man cannot answer.
It's incredible easy to make a cipher so convulated and impractical (e.g. encode by the phase of the moon determined by the fourteenth character, then transpose all vowels, add up the number of strokes within each letter using the Arial font, multiply those numbers by the number 10 places ahead of it, then look those up on a ceasar cipher) that it's boring and uninteresting to decipher it and pretty much "impossible". Unfortunately, it also becomes incredibly useless as a cipher then because it becomes tedious to communicate using it, and the security of a cipher has nothing to do with its difficulty of encryption or decryption procedure - you'll probably find that a couple of supercomputers could find enough patterns in the above "cipher" that they could find the right answers without having to even KNOW the phase of the moon.
The thing about mathematical ciphers is that the method is public and yet they are still incredibly difficult to decrypt. This isn't an interesting cipher, mathematically speaking, because the method is closed so it could be anything. All we have is some jumbled text and (presumably) a sensible answer that we're not privy to. It's more a children's puzzle than a cipher, just a very difficult one - because nobody actually uses this cipher to communicate (so the cipher can be unnecessarily complicated without actually being *secure*, the plaintext could well be complete junk, the message may even be erroneously encoded, and there's only a single - non-militarily-important - instance of an encoded text).
In short - nobody cares. It's like the book-competitions where someone buries treasure and publishes a book which "gives the details" of where it's buried. It's pretty much chance if you find it or not because there is no requirement for the answer to be logical, practical or even decryptable. The one I saw, you had to draw a line from the eye of a character on each artwork-strewn page, through their index finger, to a particular letter in a word on the outside of the page border, then interpret those clues which narrowed things down to an entire field somewhere in the UK - the "winner" was the author's former-flatmate's girlfriend.
The importance of a ciphered message is more related to its origin, the probability of it being an unintentional leak, the probability of it being militarily important, and other non-mathematical factors. Then, if you have the impetus, running it through a supercomputer with what little you know or (infinitely better) getting a couple more messages that use the same scheme and are likely to reveal commonalities. That's how we beat Engima. This is just a puzzle-book, and quite boring because it can actually just be gibberish and nobody would really care.
Re:just wondering (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the same reason Lost appealed to the masses, but not the thinking folk -- if you can throw arbitrary impossible bullshit in to "explain" something, it's not really an explanation. It became more like a bunch of kids playing Cops and Robbers with the one kid who decides he's got an alien spacecraft with a freeze ray that he can use at any point to immobilize his enemies. Call it a black swan if you want, but it certainly affects how interesting a story is.