[Clips] A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery

[R.A. Hettinga]

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  Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 15:32:26 -0400
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  From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
  Subject: [Clips] A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery
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<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/us/22puzzle.html?ei=5090&en=a4744345327d2b5f&ex=1303358400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print>

  The New York Times


  April 22, 2006

  A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery

  By KENNETH CHANG

  For nearly 16 years, puzzle enthusiasts have labored to decipher an
  865-character coded message stenciled into a sculpture on the grounds of
  the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. This week,
  the sculptor gave them an unsettling but hopeful surprise: part of the
  message they thought they had deciphered years ago actually says something
  else.

  The sculpture, titled "Kryptos," the Greek word for "hidden," includes an
  undulating sheet of copper with a message devised by the sculptor, Jim
  Sanborn, and Edward M. Scheidt, a retired chairman of the C.I.A.'s
  cryptographic center.

  The message is broken into four sections, and in 1999, a computer
  programmer named Jim Gillogly announced he had figured out the first three,
  which include poetic ramblings by the sculptor and an account of the
  opening of King Tut's tomb. The C.I.A. then announced that one of its
  physicists, David Stein, had also deciphered the first three sections a
  year earlier.

  On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Sanborn left a phone message for Elonka Dunin,
  a computer game developer who also runs an e-mail list for enthusiasts
  trying to solve the "Kryptos" puzzle. For the first time, Mr. Sanborn had
  done a line-by-line analysis of his text with what Mr. Gillogly and Mr.
  Stein had offered as the solution and discovered that part of the solved
  text was incorrect.

  Within minutes, Ms. Dunin called back, and Mr. Sanborn told her that in the
  second section, one of the X's he had used as a separator between sentences
  had been omitted, altering the solution. "He was concerned that it had been
  widely published incorrectly," Ms. Dunin said.

  Mr. Sanborn's admission was first reported Thursday by Wired News.

  Ms. Dunin excitedly started sending instant messages online to Chris
  Hanson, the co-moderator of the "Kryptos" e-mail group. Within an hour, Ms.
  Dunin figured out what was wrong. The last eight characters of the second
  section, which describes something possibly hidden on C.I.A. grounds, had
  been decoded as "IDBYROWS" which people read as "I.D. by rows" or "I.D. by
  Row S."

  In an interview yesterday, Mr. Sanborn said he had never meant that at all.
  To give himself flexibility as he carved the letters into the copper sheet,
  he had marked certain letters that could be left out. In the second
  passage, he left out an X separator before these eight letters.

  "It was purely an act of aesthetics on my part," he said.

  He said he expected that the encryption method, which relies on the
  position of the letters, would transform that part of the message into
  gibberish, and that the solvers would know to go back and reinsert the
  missing separator. But "remarkably, when you used the same system, it said
  something that was intelligible," Mr. Sanborn said. He decided to let the
  code breakers know about the error because "they weren't getting the whole
  story," he said.

  When Ms. Dunin reinserted the X, the eight characters became "LAYERTWO."
  She called Mr. Sanborn again, who confirmed that was the intended message.
  "It's a surprise, and it's exciting," Ms. Dunin said. That is the first
  real progress on "Kryptos" in more than six years. Now to figure out what
  it means.

  In an e-mail interview, Mr. Gillogly said that the corrected text, "layer
  two," is "intriguing but scarcely definitive." He added, "Like much of the
  sculpture, it can be taken in many ways." Mr. Gillogly, who has not worked
  much on the puzzle in recent years, said he would go back to see if the
  answer was now apparent.

  One possibility is that "layer two" is the crucial key for solving the rest
  of the puzzle. Or it could be a hint that the letters need to be layered
  atop one another. Mr. Sanborn and Mr. Scheidt have said that even when all
  of the text is unraveled, other puzzles will remain in "Kryptos."

  "This new discovery could possibly make it easier to crack and possibly not
  make it easier to crack," Mr. Sanborn offered unhelpfully. "It may be a
  dead-end diversion I like to send people on, a primrose lane to nowhere."

  Mr. Scheidt said it had taken only three or four months to devise a puzzle
  that has lasted nearly 16 years, adding that only he, Mr. Sanborn and
  "probably someone at C.I.A." know the answer.

  For everyone else, the remaining 97 letters of the fourth section remain
  baffling (the slashes indicate line breaks):

OBKR/UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO/TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP/VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR


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  R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
  The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
  44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
  "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
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  experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'