Monday, April 24, 2006

Breaking Kryptos

Mountains are not climbed nor marathons run merely to reach a geographical location—there are much easier ways to accomplish these feats—but as personal and spiritual challenges to the participants.

When confronted with a puzzle or problem, we sometimes can lose sight of the fact that we have issued a challenge to ourselves, not to our tools.
In the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, stands a sculpture that contains encrypted messages. It is called Kryptos, which means "hidden" in Greek. Up till now, only 3 out of 4 parts have been decoded. The quote above is derived from David Stein, the CIA analyst who was the first to partially decrypt the ciphertext.

Read about how he managed to accomplish this feat, where he explains his methods.

There's also a great website dedicated to Kryptos.

The twist in the tale is that the artist responsible for the sculpture has remained silent, and broke the silence recently only to correct a "typo" in one part of the solution!

No comments: