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.