[IP] A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery
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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: April 23, 2006 11:45:26 AM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery
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[Note: This item comes from friend John McMullen. DLH]
From: "John F. McMullen" <observer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: April 23, 2006 7:58:35 AM PDT
To: "johnmac's living room" <johnmacsgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: USA Talk List <USAtalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Cryptography Mailing
List <cryptography@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Dewayne Hendricks
<dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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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