136 Resolve

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This, ladies and gentlemen, may look like total gibberish to you... but I assure you, that I haven't gone a little crazy from whatever electromagnetic waves the computer in front of me emits. The 97 (or 98 characters, including the question mark) is the world's most well-known unsolved code, the Kryptos...

To be more specific, these characters are known as K4, or in long, Kryptos Part 4. Kryptos is a sculpture in the CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, US (I know, the irony is killing me too) created by James Sanborn. After nearly 18 years since its installation, 772 out of the 870 characters of Kryptos, has been solved, (i.e. K1, K2, and K3) while the last 98 characters remained unsolved to date.

Kryptos: The Sculpture, and all its mysteries...

The whole sculpture has two parts, the ciphertext section and the tableau. The tableau, which is on the right side in the picture, is a Vigenere Tableau, with the letters shifted to the key "Kryptos", which is used in encoding and decoding Vigenere ciphers, a type of polyalphabetic substitution cipher, which I use to encrypt secret messages in my blog sometimes. However, even with the tableau, to decode a text encrypted using a Vigenere cipher, a passkey is still required... and without the key, well, let's say reading the message becomes more difficult than spelling "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" backwards in 5 seconds.

K1 and K2 were encrypted using the Vigenere tableau, using two different passkeys (hence, the separate designation). They were Palimpsest and Abscissa respectively, and the following is the plaintexts that were revealed:

BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION

IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE HOWS THAT POSSIBLE ? THEY USED THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGRUUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO

NB: The spelling errors that you see in K1, K2 and as you will see in K3, are intentional, along with the Xs which denotes the end of sentences for aesthetic purposes.

K3 is a transposition cipher, that is, simply rearranging the letters in the plaintext, using a certain algorithm, to form the ciphertext, without changing the letters in plaintext to any other letters (unlike the substitution cipher, where the letter order is not changed, but the letters are substituted with another letter), revealing this message...

SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q(?)

NB: We are not sure whether the question mark, in brackets, belong to K3 or K4, hence the disagreement in the number of characters that remains unsolved.

Ah, after K3, is K4, the final unsolved part of the Kryptos message. Nobody knows what type of cipher or combinations of ciphers was used to encode K4, and many people across the globe are trying attempt after attempt to decode the greatest cryptography mystery in modern history. I still attempt to break it every once in a while, but unfortunately, it would seem that it would require a lot more luck, skill and knowledge, for a layman, like myself, to decode Kryptos.

If you too want to try, be my guest... because if Lady Luck happened to be sitting on your lap the day you got the answer to cracking the code, you will be world-famous. That is guaranteed...