The game developer, the CIA, and the sculpture driving them crazy

I had the chance to look at Kryptos out a window, and it is an impressive piece of art. However, the CIA museum on campus is nothing short of mind blowing and was always the highlight of my visits. https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/cia-museum

Seems like the K1 solution, "BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION", is potentially in reference to his (then not yet built) Cyrillic Projector[1] sculpture and possibly a play on the word occlusion and/or a reference to Ambient Occlusion[2] given Sanborn's direct interest:

"After Kryptos, he went onto a segment of his work where he was fascinated by the way light was projected onto things," says Dunin. "He went out into the southwest of the US at the middle of the night and he'd beam a pattern of light onto a mountain and use time-lapse photography to record it. There's dozens and dozens of pictures. They look like they're made in computer graphics, but they're Sanborn beaming light on mountains."

Given K2 also seems to be referential back to other Sanborn works, my guess is that the clues/keys lie in his other works... Interesting stuff.

[1] http://images.eurogamer.net/2013/articles/1/6/8/1/6/7/0/the-...

Elonka has given some great talks about Kryptos, and other Sanborn sculptures over the years at hacker cons like Phreaknic.

http://www.elonka.com/kryptos/ppt/index.html

She also enjoys cracking the "codes" given out at these conferences, usually printed on the backs of badges, etc. She has a great walk through on how she has done this, which are pretty cool. Layers upon layers upon layers:

http://elonka.com/mirrors/AOL/Nova1337/tutorial.htm

I wonder if the Q in IQLUSION is notable, in K3 it mentions:

    FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q ?

and in K2:

    X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO

Maybe the location in K2 is related to the position of the Q in K1 somehow.

Jim Sanborn's other encrypted sculpture, Cyrillic Projector, is located on the campus of the University of North Carolina Charlotte. It has a lamp inside that shines through mirror-image Cyrillic text so that when the letters hit the building they're facing the right way.

I saw it a few years ago, and it's intriguing. I went on a Saturday afternoon and had no problems with campus security. Not sure what would happen if you showed up late at night.

https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=35.306013,-80.729261&s...

From a construction aspect, it's cool how he was able to get the letters cut in the steel (it's 1" thick), presumably with a water jet, and then get the panels curved without distorting them.

Can we get layout of if you stand at x degrees from statue facing y angle what the text reads. I can't get around the fact that it's curved. There must be a reason that it is curved. Also the x's and q's could mean something like re-placing the organization of the messages to a surface with those angles with x's on one side and q's on the other.

If you overlay the solved messages on the same bent surface with that type of curve you also get different results.

The reason for it being curved that way is if you stare at it from certain angles it is probably several more puzzles (based on field of view). The fourth box is probably made of more than just the 3 earlier puzzles solved but instead by different angle view puzzles. This would of course make it misleading to try to use the first three puzzles to solve the fourth.

This kinda bugs me on the binary route. What binary representation is she referring to as being tried. Is it plain old binary with every symbol representing a 1 or a 0 or is it hexadecimal encoded binary or decimal encoded binary.

There's just so many ways to represent binary.

Would that remove any patterns you would normally find?

She is right there's just an infinite way to approach this problem. :)

Maybe the angle where each letter sits is important. Since the whole thing seems to cover half a circle/cylinder.

If cryptography is broken before implementation, then you are going to have to search "before" Kryptos was implemented.