CIA Kryptos Puzzle Creator Releases Final Clues

The latest clues to the CIA mystery Kryptos Puzzle released

TO Dan Vergano edited by Clara Moskowitz

WASHINGTON, DC – New clues legendary Kryptos puzzle sculpture The location of the CIA became known on Wednesday. Speaking from the International Spy Museum stage, artist Jim Sanborn, who created the encrypted riddle, said it had not been fully deciphered as claimed, and shared tantalizing tips for finding the full solution.

Later in November, Sanborn, 79, will auction off the solution to the fourth piece of the sculpture, called “K4,” the 79 encrypted letters beginning with “OBKR.” “K4 has not been solved or decrypted,” Sanborn said, despite news in September that journalists Jarrett Kobeck and Richard Byrne found his decrypted text in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution. (They have since promised not to publish the text of the decision.)

The artist sought to speak out before he sold ownership of the full solution. “This is kind of my last chance to get the word out that the new owner – or as I call it, Kryptos custodian — will be able to speak and do after the transfer,” Sanborn said.

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Installed at CIA headquarters in 1990. Kryptos is a curved copper panel on which letters are placed, forming four coded messages. The mystery has long intrigued cryptographers and the public, and it gained widespread fame when it was mentioned on the cover of a Dan Brown novel. Da Vinci Code. Sanborn also officially announced that the long-hinted “K5” code message would be released when K4 was resolved. The new puzzle will be visible somewhere in the “public space,” Sanborn said. The new code will include elements of other puzzles and, like K4, will consist of 97 characters. Both 97-letter messages will contain the same encoded words in the same position.

In his speech, Sanborn advised anyone who wants to find the key to deciphering K4 to “get creative.” And in open letter to the crypto community he announced four new keys to the complete solution:

• The solution involves two events: Sanborn's trip to Egypt in 1986 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

• “BERLINCLOCK” mentioned in previous K4 clues refers to the world clock in Berlin.

• Codes inside Kryptos it's about “delivering the message”

• K5 is thematically related to the reading of the text of K2, “it is buried somewhere.”

Sanborn spoke about his work with the CIA to create the sculpture, noting that if he tried to bury any more evidence at the site, it would have to be “ephemeral” to pass the scrutiny he and his colleagues faced daily during the installation.

His presentation at the International Spy Museum was reminiscent of a detective story: he hinted at a hidden secret, the culmination of his mysteries. Ahead of the auction Kryptos materials, Sanborn developed an AI-powered response system to automate responses to those who claim to have deciphered K4. And he will share the system with the auction winner.

First three Kryptos the puzzles were solved in the 1990s. The first two were Vigenere cipherswhich shift each letter by a predetermined amount each time it is used in the pattern revealed by their key. The solution to Problem K3 involves a transposition code that rotates the letters into anagram order. The key to solving the puzzle is the password that reveals the spins. Such codes have been widely used in World War II and Cold War.

However, the K4 encoding method remains a mystery. In his speech, Sanborn good-naturedly dismissed the question from Scientific American about the mathematics of the K4 solution, joking: “Who said this was even a mathematical solution?” He later remarked, “I was lucky that I wasn't good at math, probably due to my ability to write code.”

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