Intel Today

“Maintaining secrecy about the sculpture became a challenging part of creating Kryptos. Both Jim and I were under scrutiny by the media who wanted badly to know the answer. To be honest, I don’t know the answer. After Jim finished the sculpture, I never went back to check the code.”

Edward Scheidt  — Former CIA Head of Cryptography

“Within two days of receiving the information tasking from Chief, Z, they had solved parts one through three of the puzzle. They spent another day on the fourth section, but very quickly a decision was made to stop any further work on it. Given the suspected cryptography, the last section is too short to solve without diverting a great deal of effort from operational problems.”

WIRED — [quoting a NSA Memo]

The ciphertext on the left-hand side of the sculpture (as seen from the courtyard) of the main sculpture contains 869 characters in total (865 letters and 4 question marks). The right-hand side of the sculpture comprises a keyed Vigenère encryption tableau, consisting of 867 letters. In our last posts about KRYPTOS, we learned how to break a Vigenère code and we apply this knowledge to the entire section II. In this post, we look at the inside story of the NSA people who took the challenge to decrypt — part of — the KRYPTOS code. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY Continue reading →