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The Mystery of “Kryptos”
At the entrance to the New Headquarters building, the sculpture begins with two red granite and copperplate constructions which flank the walkway from the parking deck. These stones appear as pages jutting from the earth with copperplate ‘between the pages’ on which there are International Morse code and ancient ciphers. There is also a lodestone (a naturally magnetized rock) co-located with a navigational compass rose.

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In the courtyard, a calm, reflective pool of water lies between two layered slabs of granite and tall grasses. Directly across from this is the centerpiece of “Kryptos,” a piece of petrified wood supporting an S-shaped copper screen surrounding a bubbling pool of water.

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•The petrified tree symbolizes the trees that once stood on the site of the sculpture and that were the source of materials on which written language has been recorded.
•The bubbling pool symbolizes information being disseminated with the destination being unknown.
•The copperplate screen has exactly 1,735 alphabetic letters cut into it.
In addition to its purely aesthetic qualities, Kryptos contains codes that are important to the history of cryptography. When we stand in the CIA courtyard and look at Kryptos from the front, the petrified tree is to the left of the copper screen. From this vantage point the left half of the copper screen is the encoded text and the right half of the copper screen is a series of alphabets, one above the other and is a "chart" called Vigeneries Tableaux developed by 16th century French cryptographer Blaise de Vigenere. In Kryptos this chart has been intentionally flipped so it can only be read from the back of the sculpture. The artist used this "chart" system, in combination with matrix coding systems, to encipher the first three encoded texts on the left side of the screen. The artist designed the fourth section (now referred to as K4) to be very difficult to crack and as of yet, it has not been broken.

The sculpture has been a source of mystery and challenge for Agency employees, other government employees, and interested people outside of government. In early 1998, a CIA physicist announced to the Agency that he had cracked the code for three of the four sections. This was followed a year later by a public announcement from a California computer scientist that he had done the same. As varied as the codes in the sculpture are, so were the methods to crack them. The Agency employee used pencil and paper, and the computer scientist used his computer. No one has yet to break the code for the remaining 97-character message which utilizes a more difficult cryptographic code.

James Sanborn once said “They will be able to read what I wrote, but what I wrote is a mystery itself.” Only time will tell if the final message to this multi-layered puzzle is ever revealed.

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Solvers
The first person to publicly announce solving the first three sections, in 1999, was James Gillogly, a computer scientist from southern California, who deciphered 760 of the characters (772 less 3 question marks and XLAYERTWO). The portion that he couldn't solve, the remaining 97 or 98 characters, is the same part which has stumped the government's own cryptanalysts. After Gillogly's announcement, the CIA revealed that their analyst David Stein had also solved the same sections in 1998, using pencil and paper techniques, though at the time of his solution the information was only disseminated within the intelligence community, and no public announcement was made. The NSA also claimed at that time that they had solvers, but would not reveal names or dates until 2005, when it was learned that an NSA team led by Ken Miller, along with Dennis McDaniels and two other unnamed individuals, had solved parts 1–3 using a computer in late 1992, but that they too had been stumped by the fourth section.

The Panels
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Solution 1
Keywords: Kryptos, Palimpsest Decipher



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The first section, K1, uses a modified Vigenère cipher. It's encrypted through substitution—each letter corresponds to another—and can be solved only with the alphabetic rows of letters on the right. The keywords, which help determine the substitutions, are KRYPTOS and PALIMPSEST. A misspelling—in this case IQLUSION—may be a clue to cracking K4.

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Solution 2
Keywords: Kryptos, Abscissa


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K2, like the first section, was also encrypted using the alphabets on the right. One new trick Sanborn used, though, was to insert an X between some sentences, making it harder to crack the code by tabulating letter frequency. The keywords here are KRYPTOS and ABSCISSA. And there's another intriguing misspelling: UNDERGRUUND.

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Solution 3



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A different cryptographic technique was used for K3: transposition. All the letters are jumbled and can be deciphered only by uncovering the complex matrices and mathematics that determined their misplacement. Of course, there is a misspelling (DESPARATLY), and the last sentence (CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING?) is strangely bracketed by an X and a Q.

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Remains unsolved.

Sources:
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thats interesting
1300 posts!!!!!!!!!!

yes interesting but its just the same letter written diagonally down the page with a different letter at the top?

An interesting side note.

The numbers in translation 2 refers to coordinates, of which, point to a location approximately 200 feet south of the "Kryptos".

Nothing has ever been found to be buried there.

38°57′6.5″N 77°8′44″W

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