Thought this was interesting, from over at Slate:
In the central courtyard of CIA headquarters stands an odd statue—in the shape of a 12-foot-high, S-shaped wall with letters punched out of it—named Kryptos (the Greek word for “hidden”). The statue, created by Jim Sanborn and installed in 1990, is more than just a curious piece of art, though. It contains four different encrypted codes that have served as a topic of discussion and distraction for cryptanalysts around the world.
It was nearly a decade after Kryptos was created before CIA analyst David Stein and computer scientist Jim Gillogly, working independently, cracked the first three codes within a year of each other. Both men gained public attention and notoriety in the field of cryptography for their efforts. But, as Wired reported on Wednesday, new documents obtained via FOIA request by Elonka Dunin, an expert on Kryptos, tell a different story. A small team of cryptanalysts at the National Security Agency—yes, the one and the same—worked out the first three codes on Kryptos years before Stein or Gillogly. And it took them less than a month to do so. All they needed was a formal challenge from the CIA’s then-deputy director, which inspired a few NSA cryptanalysts to sit down, work out three of the puzzles—the fourth code in Kryptos remains a unsolved to this day—and report back with their success in June 1993….
This is Kryptos, which I think I recognize from an episode of “Homeland,” in a scene in which Claire Danes and Damian Lewis run into each other outside CIA HQ.
I’m intrigued that the artist who created it managed to include one code (out of the four) that the boffins at NSA couldn’t crack.
Maybe Snowden has the answer on his laptop.
Or maybe it was just random gobbledegook, intended to drive the cryptographers crazy…
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No, I was wrong. The sculpture beside which the “Homeland” characters meet was similar, but apparently not Kryptos.
Google Images is amazing.