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

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: April 23, 2006 11:45:26 AM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery
Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com

[Note:  This item comes from friend John McMullen.  DLH]

From: "John F. McMullen" <observer () westnet com>
Date: April 23, 2006 7:58:35 AM PDT
To: "johnmac's living room" <johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com>
Cc: USA Talk List <USAtalk () yahoogroups com>, Cryptography Mailing  
List <cryptography () wasabisystems com>, Dewayne Hendricks  
<dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery

From the New York Times -- <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/us/ 
22puzzle.html? 
ex=1303358400&en=a4744345327d2b5f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss>

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.

[snip]

Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>



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