Kryptos facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Kryptos |
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| Artist | Jim Sanborn |
| Year | 1990 |
| Location | George Bush Center for Intelligence, Langley, Virginia |
| 38°57′08″N 77°08′45″W / 38.95227°N 77.14573°W | |
Kryptos is a distributed sculpture by the American artist Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters, the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the four encrypted messages it bears. Of these four messages, the first three have been solved, while the fourth message remains one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world. The sculpture continues to be of interest to cryptanalysts, both amateur and professional, who are attempting to decipher the fourth passage. The artist has so far given four clues to this passage.
Description
The main part of the sculpture is located in the northwest corner of the New Headquarters Building courtyard, outside of the Agency's cafeteria. The sculpture comprises four large copper plates with other elements consisting of water, wood, plants, red and green granite, white quartz, and petrified wood. The most prominent feature is a large vertical S-shaped copper screen resembling a scroll or a piece of paper emerging from a computer printer, half of which consists of encrypted text. The characters are all found within the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, along with question marks, and are cut out of the copper plates. The main sculpture contains four separate enigmatic messages, three of which have been deciphered.
In addition to the main part of the sculpture, Jim Sanborn also placed other pieces of art at the CIA grounds, such as several large granite slabs with sandwiched copper sheets outside the entrance to the New Headquarters Building. Several morse code messages are found on these copper sheets, and one of the stone slabs has an engraving of a compass rose pointing to a lodestone. Other elements of Sanborn's installation include a landscaped garden area, a fish pond with opposing wooden benches, a reflecting pool, and other pieces of stone including a triangle-shaped black stone slab.
The name Kryptos comes from the ancient Greek word for "hidden", and the theme of the sculpture is "Intelligence Gathering".
The cost of the sculpture in 1988 was US $250,000 (worth US $501,000 in 2016).
Encrypted messages
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.
In April 2006, however, Sanborn released information stating that a letter was omitted from this side of Kryptos "for aesthetic reasons, to keep the sculpture visually balanced".
There are also three misspelled words in the plaintext of the deciphered first three passages, which Sanborn has said was intentional, and three letters (YAR) near the beginning of the bottom half of the left side are the only characters on the sculpture in superscript.
The right-hand side of the sculpture comprises a keyed Vigenère encryption tableau, consisting of 867 letters.
One of the lines of the Vigenère tableau has an extra character (L). Bauer, Link, and Molle suggest that this may be a reference to the Hill cipher as an encryption method for the fourth passage of the sculpture. However, Sanborn omitted the extra letter from small Kryptos models that he sold.
Related sculptures
Kryptos was the first cryptographic sculpture made by Sanborn.
After producing Kryptos he went on to make several other sculptures with codes and other types of writing, including one entitled Antipodes, which is at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., an "Untitled Kryptos Piece" that was sold to a private collector, and Cyrillic Projector, which contains encrypted Russian Cyrillic text that included an extract from a classified KGB document.
The cipher on one side of Antipodes repeats the text from Kryptos. Much of the cipher on Antipodes' other side is duplicated on Cyrillic Projector. The Russian portion of the cipher found on Cyrillic Projector and Antipodes was solved in 2003 by Frank Corr and Mike Bales independently from each other with translation from Russian plaintext provided by Elonka Dunin.
Ex Nexum was installed in 1997 at Little Rock Old U.S. Post Office & Courthouse.
Some additional sculptures by Sanborn include Native American texts: Rippowam was installed at the University of Connecticut, in Stamford in 1999, while Lux was installed in 2001 at an old US Post Office building in Fort Myers, Florida. Iacto is located at the University of Iowa, between the Adler Journalism Building and Main Library.
Indian Run is located next to the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Beltsville, Maryland, and contains a bronze cylinder perforated with the text of the Iroquois Book of the Great Law. This document includes the contribution of the indigenous peoples to the United States legal system. The text is written in Onondaga and was transcribed from the ancient oral tradition of five Iroquois nations.
A,A was installed at the Plaza in front of the new library at the University of Houston, in Houston, Texas, in 2004, and Radiance was installed at the Department of Energy, Coast, and Environment, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge in 2008.
See also
In Spanish: Kryptos para niños
- Copiale cipher
- History of cryptography
- Voynich manuscript
