Kryptos Solution

I've always been curious about the Morse code segments. The dual rows of text. The lodestone. The compass rose. The aligned stone outcroppings. More importantly, the words themselves seem to be completely disconnected to the rest of the Kryptos K1-K3 text. In truth, each section seems disconnected. But at least K1 and K2 seem to be talking about clues or how to find something. On the other hand, the Morse code appears to be a series of disjointed words even within its own context. That is what has me puzzled.

DIGETAL INTERPRETATI(ON)
SHADOW FORCES
(WHA)T IS YOUR POSITION w/ lodestone next to POSITION
LUCID MEMORY
VIRTUALLY INVISIBLE
SOS RQ

INVISIBLE is the only word that appears in any of K1-K3. Maybe this was a crib? I'm not sure how you could do that with pencil and paper, but the word does appear early on in K2.

In doing some research, I noticed that Sanborn had done an earlier piece called INVISIBLE FORCES created in 1987. Those two words appear in the Morse code. That piece is awfully similar to Kryptos. There is a compass rose, a lodestone and stones. There's another piece by the same name made in 1982. It appears to be compass magnets (lots of them) all pointing in the same direction floating in the air in the shaped of a diamond.

There were two other pieces by Sanborn that have similar components to Kryptos. There was Find the Lodestone in 1985-86 where there isn't a lodestone, but a compass rose. There is also an alternate name for the piece Hidden under the Three Events. What are the three events? There are three separate features of this pieces relating to celestial events. A brass shooting star, a thunderbolt and a comet. Two of them are inscribed or decorated onto two of the four sides of a column that seem to support the building next to it. One is definitely a lightning bolt. Many of Sanborn's pieces have a lightning bolt made from inserting ever increasing gaps in slabs of stones. The other, I can't tell if it's the comet or the shooting star. Not sure where the third element is located at.

The last piece that relates to Kryptos is the Wabash Outcrop. This isn't the only piece that uses outcroppings. The reason I bring this up is that this one is buried just like in Kryptos. In most of his other pieces, the outcroppings are separated at some point to create an image of some kind, usually lightning.

There are still more pieces out there with lodestones. All of Sanborn's pieces seem to be based off similar themes that he's recycled over time.

Did Sanborn reference his earlier piece directly with "INVISIBLE FORCES"? I think he did. Here's why. There is a piece he did, several in the same group in fact, called Covert Ops Fragments. Many have been solved, but those in Russian and Arabic have not. There is also the Zola Spy Restaurant piece. These are extremely linked to the Kryptos piece. The English COF pieces use the Kryptos Keyword in the vigenere table. One piece is even exactly 97 letters long. The Zola piece uses K3's double rotation encryption method. It even has a word at the beginning (DINE) just like K3 does (END).

I think Sanborn may be leaving clues. I think the earlier pieces he's referenced in Kryptos are also clues.

One thing I did find out is that Sanborn seemed to have been conscious of a very important fact about encryption even in his earlier pieces. The Invisible Forces piece was made for Electronic Industries Alliance. This is the organization that created many standards in telecommunications. But they don't do standards for protocols. They do standards for the carrier. For example, they came up with RS-232 for serial communications. Anyone who's done any kind of serial programming in the 80's or 90's will have heard the term RS-232. It did not specify how you encoded the message. It only specified the hardware and voltages. The handshaking and encoding at the message level was up to you.

In Kryptos, there seems to be a very real separation of these two concepts. The use of magnetism or electrical impulses to send the message are talked about separately from the actual message itself in K2. And looking at the Morse code, the lodestone may signify the electrical impulses that carry the signal. But the continuous sequence of E's found in the Morse code could signify that the message never ends when using such a carrier. You cannot stop sending something. There is always a voltage, even when zero, that means something. The message must be sent within this continuous carrier.

Why two lines of Morse? Seems to indicate a sub-carrier. This is where you piggy back another message on top of the original one. Perhaps this is a clue to a second layer of encoding.

I am currently working on a new angle relating to all of this. It seems to me that K4 isn't just something you look at and try to decode as is. I think it has gone through many methods. Perhaps a combination of earlier methods. The outcroppings in the courtyard may signify a combination of methods. If we look at the outcroppings at the entrance, they have 1, 2 and 3 slabs. The two in the courtyard have 4. I think there are four pieces needed for the final decoding. That each layer in the outcroppings in the courtyard represent one layer of the final decryption process.

The dual messages in the Morse code. The dual outcroppings in the courtyard. The oddly placed LAYERTWO at the end of K2. The raised letters AYR that appear in the same location as AYR (hot air?) in LAYERTWO (yes, A and Y are swapped), but leaving only three letters would seem to indicate this is LAYER THREE. That leaves layer 1 and 4. It also leaves us with what each layer actually means even though we know the location of each.

(edit: As further explanation for LAYER THREE, we have YAR and an L at the end of the tableau on the same line. So we have enough letters to create LAYR with a missing e. The plaintext word DESPARATLY in K3 also has a missing e.)

If we go with the fact that K2 is layer 2 and K3 is layer 3 and we assume that these layers represent the algorithms, then step 2 is Quag III and step 3 is some kind of double rotation. I don't think step 1 is K1. I think it's the Morse code. Some kind of digital conversion. Perhaps not Morse, but something else. And the last step is perhaps a new encoding method not yet seen in Kryptos, but that is solvable once we get there.

What makes me think that these layers are encoding methods? I believe that WATER is symbolism for something that is moving, something that is always transforming itself. If you look at Kryptos, the pool is immediately below the Vigenere tableau. That tableau is the encryption method of K1 and K2. It was also supposed to be a whirlpool originally. That would represent the encryption method of K3. I think the pond in between the two outcroppings in the courtyard follows a similar metaphor. In this case the layers represent the encryption methods. Since there are two outcroppings, I think K4 isn't a single section. I think two parts need to be used together somehow. Either K4 needs to be split up. Or another section is required, perhaps in an ISO fashion. An ISO is where the same message is encrypted using different keys (possibly different methods as well). It may also be possible that K4 isn't just one section, but two. They need to be split up and decoded separately and put back together.

I have found indications of where to split up K4. I have also found indications that some letters need to be removed, or rather the positioning altered somehow to create an interrupted key sequence. Remember how in K2, the question marks were simply skipped over without skipping over the next key letter. Well, in K4, I've seen indications that spaces need to be inserted at certain locations. Or even that the key letter needs to go backward in some situations.

I've explained why I think all of this. But let's recap the duality found in Kryptos and the other pieces that relate to it. The Morse has two sequences. There are two outcroppings in the courtyard. In K3's plaintext, we have a misspelled word between identical words SLOWLY. The Zola spy piece has two separate sections that have to be pieced together. This is VERY reminiscent of the two outcroppings being pushed together to form a single outcropping. And finally, there is the COF piece that has exactly 97 letters. It has no duality, but it does have an undecoded Cyrillic counterpart that also has 97 letters. This piece is also found within another larger piece where that subsection actually has 100 letters, but with several variations. The small piece has 5 letters that are different from the larger piece. 4 missing letters and 1 extra letter as compared to the larger piece. This leaves it with 97 letters.

In conclusion, I really do think there is no such thing as K4, but rather K4 and K5. Both have separate encodings that then need to be put back together. This will likely give hope to those pursuing the VIC cipher. The VIC cipher cannot be decoded from the first letter. You need to know where the cipher begins. It is usually somewhere in the middle of the text. Also, the very last ciphertext letters, after being converted to digits, usually indicate how many groups to go back to find the true start of the ciphertext. With K4, I'm not sure there is an actual indicator at the end. Rather, there is an alignment that can be done to find out where K4 really starts. After I did this, I found WLDL and YAR in the ciphertext. Using my Quagmire decoder, it found a key right away though it wasn't an actual word, and it did not give anything readable. What's strange about this is that the same key was repeated for the other keylength of higher multiples. For example, if the key was 6, then at 12 you had the same key repeated twice and at a keylength of 18, the key was repeated three times (with some characters being different of course for statistical reasons). This is usually a very STRONG indication that the ciphertext is Quagmire, but perhaps with different tableau keys and plaintext key (Kryptos in K1 and K2 uses the same ciphertext and plaintext key BTW).

Am I onto something? I don't know. The duality aspect of Kryptos keeps pulling me toward ISO's. The masking could very well be the splitting of the message into two separate parts. The Cyrillic COF piece worries me a bit. If the masking was the removal of 4 letters, the insertion of a bogus letter and 5 misspellings, we may be in for a world of hurt.

What this ultimately means is that you can't just crack K4. It has to be solved. The cryptographers have been wrong all along. Their refusal to look at the clues in the ciphertext is why it's taken this long to find nothing. They are the experts. And they are looking the other way. If it truly is a puzzle, then we need to figure out what the other parts are. Put them together and apply it to the final piece. Anything less is not a puzzle.

I came across something quite by accident yesterday. I wasn't looking for it. I didn't even know it existed. Although it has answered a lot, I now have more questions than before. I was being too clever before. WAY too clever. I do think that much of what I found is valid. But how it is pieced together is more direct.

I'm still looking into this, but what I can say is that the raised letters are WAY more direct than anyone thinks. I know what the misspellings are. At least in K1 and K2. I'm not sure about the misspellings in K3 though as it relates to what I found. Well, I think I know what the missing E signifies. I also know what SOS and RQ are. So lots of things have been revealed. Oh, and part of LAYER TWO is now known. Again, I know what these all are now. I just don't know what I'm supposed to do with them. It really is like a puzzle. I have all these pieces, but no instructions on how to put them together.

And I should state up front that all these things are 100% direct. There are no interpretations or anything like that. What I'm trying to figure out is how the coordinates and palindromes fit in all of this. I think the coordinates have special meaning. And I did find out more about them.

I will reveal something simple. Take the last 4 letters of K2's ciphertext. AETG. I've said before that this could anagram to GATE. Let's look at the Morse code for this. But all I know right now is that it is connected to the misspellings and the Morse palindromes.

A  E T G
.- . - --.  

Remember the Fibonacci sequence I talked about in the past? END^YAH^R. See the sequence? Three lowered letters, two raised letters, one lowered letter and one raised letter. 3211. Reverse it to be forward. 1123. And now we split up the above Morse code with these counts.

E T A  G
. - .- --.  

Reversing the letters (not the Morse), it makes GATE.

The reader may think this is convoluted. And it is. But it's just the tip of the iceberg. GATE is key. The above steps are not what's important. It's just something else to guide you toward the word GATE. This word appears in other ways. And those other ways reveal what I have found.

From The Free Dictionary:

gate 1
n.
1. A structure that can be swung, drawn, or lowered to block an entrance or a passageway.

LAYER TWO is the DOORWAY.

I feel like I'm at the point in K3 where the flame flickers. I've discovered something. But all I've got is hot air. I don't have anything significant as far as decoding K4 is concerned. The details of the room within emerged from the mist. But how?

I know what the debris is. I know what the top left corner reveals. I know what SOS is. I definitely know what RQ is. It's those damn palindromes that are giving me problems. I think if I can figure how to use them, I'll be one step MUCH closer to the truth. BTW, there is a palindrome in the coordinates.

I'm starting to think that the numbers from the coordinates form a short message. I used to think it was some kind of key for the Gronsfeld or something like that based on UNDERGRUUND. I'm now thinking the digits are an actual short message. Perhaps a couple words. Scheidt said it was difficult designing a duress cipher. A duress cipher is a dual encryption. Not in the usual sense though. It means it can have TWO meanings. LAYER TWO could be that second meaning. So the way a duress cipher works is that you have a decoding that seems to make sense on the surface. So when it asks in K2 "Who knows the exact location?", the response is "ONLY WW. THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X ..." followed by the coordinates. Those coordinates look like a location. But if the coordinates had a second meaning, then that would be the real message. Usually, a duress cipher is where you give your captors a key that decodes a fake message. They decode it and hopefully the fake message sounds plausible enough. But using the exact same ciphertext, you're supposed to be able to decode the true message using a different key. So if the coordinates hide another message, then the end of K2 could certainly act as a duress cipher. Only difference from the way duress ciphers usually work is that you'd be working with the plaintext (or information found within the plaintext) instead of using the ciphertext.

With only 11 digits, there doesn't seem to be much there to produce a message. Perhaps one or two words only.

I'll reveal the rest at a later date. It is real and tangible. And there is somewhat of a reflective nature to it as well. Or at the very least, there is a clear duality. It reminds me of the two outcroppings in the courtyard with the pond in between seemingly acting as a reflection. I have those two reflected sequences. But what do I do with them? I don't know. The word DESPARATLY sits between the words SLOWLY on either side seemingly in a representative form of those outcroppings. DESPARATLY might hold the key on what to do with the reflected sequences.

I feel like I have the solution and don't even know it. Anyways, I'll keep looking and tell more later. Sorry for being so ambiguous.

Sanborn has given us six decoded letters.

The letters from position 64 to 69 are NYPVTT. When decoded, they spell BERLIN.

Here is the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/us/21code.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

That's quite amazing that he would reveal actual letters. And like I said last time, he has confirmed that the text is 97 characters long.

Just what I heard from a few sites. Thought it'd be important for people to know.

That it will somehow remove it from the CIA and make it "global". I don't think he means this literally. Also says that it won't be plain as day. Maybe there is something on the grounds that aren't available to the public and he will make it available to everyone.

He also says that he will set up a website where people can submit their solutions. He says you need to supply the first 10 characters before he'll consider seeing more. But I don't like that. Ask for the first 20. What I see happening is people hitting that site like crazy.

What's worse is if it's automated. That'd be nuts.

I really don't see this as a good idea at all. I'm almost willing to bet that he'll take the site down within hours.

I don't have much time to spend on Kryptos anymore. So I'm going to reveal a new theory I've been working on lately. This is part I. Other parts will follow.

I think Sanborn may have left subtle clues in his other pieces. One collection of his is called Covert Ops. It has many pieces and are located in several different locations. The English pieces have been decoded, but not the Cyrillic or Arabic pieces. I don't have access to the Arabic pieces. But the Cyrillic one has been intractable in my attempts to decode it.

Take a look at John's English Covert Ops page. We see two pieces decoded using the Kryptos table. That's a point blank link to Kryptos. It uses Quagmire III just like K1 and K2. The keyword of the first piece is DECEIT. The plaintext talks about intercepting mail and documents from the Russians. Perhaps this is a clue about K2. It's an intercepted communication. Sanborn has admitted as much.

The second piece is interesting in that it has exactly 97 characters just like K4. But it is also encoded using Quagmire III using the same Kryptos table. The keyword is SHADOW. The text is poignant because it talks about uncovering intentions.

The other pieces are located at the Zoly Spy Restaurant. There are two pieces that are meant to be patched together line per line. Then the extra letters are to be removed. And finally, a single rotation is to be done with columns of 16 to decode the text. I find it strange that it is not a double rotation like K3. But what I find most interesting is the word at the top left. It says DINE. This would lead on to believe that the word END at the top left of K3 is not coincidence. I'm also wondering if this is linked to the "breach in the upper left corner" that is found in the plaintext of K3. The decoded text here is very similar to K3. It's a variation of the same text, but at the end, it says "I COULD SEE NOTHING XX".

However, what REALLY interests me is the fact that we see the words SOLI and ISEE running down the right hand side of the encrypted text. SOLI is the Roman Sun God. In K4, the word SOLI also appears. It makes me believe that K3 and K4 are linked together in more ways than one.

Something that caught my eye is the beginning of the 13th line of the second section. DEICET. It has all the same letters as DECEIT. Only the I is misplaced. This is why the word QHEEN and XUEEN may not be as random as we though. Remember that the Cyrillic Projector has the keyword right in the ciphertext.

Ok, enough background. Let's get to it.

I believe that K3 speaks about the first steps to be done to K4. But that at the end, the flame will flicker. IOW, nothing more will be seen until we do something else. We'll visit that part in another post.

The first part says SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY. What's missing? The E. With LAYERTWO, look where the E is located. I think Sanborn really did commit a mistake. I think LAYERTWO was supposed to be there all along. But I think he removed the X as misdirection. It's actually the E that should be removed. If we decrypt with that letter gone, it would give LAY ROWS.

THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED

We need to remove the E at the end of K4. You will see something remarkable.

dYAhR
EKCAR

I've always believed that this word should have been ROCK backwards. IOW, it's a misspelling. RACK should have been ROCK. ROCK is debris. We could remove it, but I'll leave it in for now. With the overlay of DYAHR, we see that the lowered letters are to be removed or are misspelled. The word "END" at the beginning of K3 also tells us where DYAHR is to be used.

So what now? We've removed the E. This follows parallels with DESPARATLY, LAYERTWO and the extra letters in the Zola Spy Restaurant pieces. But remember how we needed to use both pieces in the Zola Spy segments? And with the other fragments where it says we need to uncover the intention of the work.

Here's what I think happened.

I believe that K3 and K4 use the same cipher just like K1 and K2 use the same cipher. True that both Sanborn and Scheidt have said that K4 is something else entirely. But hear me out. Suppose that the intercepted K2 message wasn't cut off. Suppose that it continues on to K4. I believe that the correct ordering is K1, K3, K2, K4. Why? Because the English Covert Ops fragment says "I COULD SEE NOTHING". It looks like it's telling you the answer to "CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING". At the very beginning of K2, it says "IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE." That's essentially the same meaning as "I COULD SEE NOTHING". There are other reasons too like the X just before the question in K3. X's are normally found in K2. So there's a definite link there.

Here's what I'm getting at. Assuming that K4 follows K2, then WW's full message doesn't end with LAYER TWO. It ends with K4. But the people talking in K2 haven't decoded his message. The way they're talking, they haven't found the key or the cipher "WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ?". And then the other person recites WW's message. This message would be encoded. But then the entire conversation is encoded AGAIN!!!

Think of it this way. Suppose you see a secret encoded message that you cannot decode that says TANSHULRGKKCOULCUORHTU. Then you send it to a friend asking if they can take a look. But it's top secret, so you would send your message to your friend encoded. The message would be something like this.

Hi Bob, I found this ultra top secret code, but cannot make sense of it. Could you take a look? Thanks. Here is the message. TANSHULRGKKCOULCUORHTU

Then you would encode that whole message. This means that TANSHULRGKKCOULCUORHTU gets encoded twice. Once by the original sender. And once more when you send your message to Bob.

These are called END TO END ciphers. In fact, most ciphers work this way. Other transport mechanism work with POINT TO POINT ciphers. They encode a message for one leg of the transmission where it is decoded to be re-encoded for the next leg. But it end to end ciphers, only the sender and receiver can decode it.

Putting K2 and K4 together may be a representation of what the Zoly Spy segments are trying to tell us.

Ok, we've removed the E and we get a word ROCK which is four letters wide. If LAY ROWS is any indication, then we need 4 columns. Also, the word YAR has letter indexes which add up to 44. The outcroppings in the courtyard each have 4 layers.

WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER

That's the next line of K3. Trembling hands means something gets moved around. And from what we've seen, tiny breach in the upper left hand corner means that we'll get a readable word in the upper left hand corner. Breach is a breach in the cipher (aka getting something readable).

Rotating counterclockwise with columns of 4 gives the following.

ROLLBRPKTSSZJDINTFGXDUUR
KXUOBLQGOQSZTUWBVZWZCKAA
BOHSFFQNSTQKALAFPMKKJGUC
OUGBIWVRSWJEWKINYTPDTIHK


We get the word ROLL. Note too that we get the word RACK (misspelled ROCK) along the right hand side just like the Zola Spy pieces.

We remove ROLL and RACK.

AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN

We do another rotation.

KZNXKBOTVCOFTLMGGVJIPH
PSIGUOGZBZBFSAPJUWWKTI
RSDFUUQSWWASNKFKOISWYT
BTJTDXLQUZKHQQAKUBREND


At the bottom right, we see the words "HIT END".

THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER

We've reached the end of this stage. I don't believe that the above is the correct ordering. I think there was a small step that had to be done beforehand. But that's for next time when we look at the masking technique.