In the 1980s, the CIA announced a competition to design a sculpture to decorate the courtyard of its new headquarters building in Langley. According to the terms of the competition, the sculpture had to correspond to the owners and contain some kind of secret. The sculptor Jim Sanborn won the competition. The main part of his sculpture was a huge - four-meter sheet of copper, all covered with a mysterious encrypted text. The ciphertext itself consists of letters of the Latin alphabet and several question marks. The scroll's inscription is divided into four sections. The total number of symbols is 865. The monument was named Kryptos - and it has become one of the most famous, still unsolved cryptograms in the world. The cryptogram contains four different pieces of text that are encrypted using different ciphers. These fragments were named in the ransomware environment - K1, K2, K3 and K4.
Despite the fact that more than 20 years have passed since the installation, the text of the message is still far from being deciphered. The world community of cryptanalysts, along with the CIA and FBI workers, have been able to decipher only the first three sections during this time. Until now, 97 characters of the last part (known as K4) remain undeciphered.
For the first time, Kryptos was partially deciphered by cryptanalyst from Los Angeles James Gillogly. He was able to decode the inscriptions in the first three sections.
К1 - The sculptor's poetic metaphor: "Between the vague shadow and the absence of light lies the illusion of nuance."
K2 - The coordinates of the CIA headquarters and the words: “Does Langley know about this? They should - it’s buried somewhere there. Who knows the exact location? WW only."
K3- An excerpt from the report of the famous Egyptologist Howard Carter on his opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun: “Slowly, desperately slowly, the remnants of the debris that had blocked the lower part of the passage were removed. With shaking hands, I made a tiny hole in the upper left corner of the opening. And then, widening the hole a little, I put a candle in there and looked inside. The hot air leaving the cell made the flames flutter, but the details of the room were still visible in the darkness. Do you see anything?"
In honor of the 20th anniversary of the discovery of the monument, Sanborn gave a hint to The New York Times: the characters of section K4 from 64 to 69 (NYPVTT) after decryption are BERLIN.
According to Sanborn, the only person he has shared the K4 text with is former CIA Director William Webster. By virtue of this theory, the fact that the decrypted text of K3 contains the words "Who knows the exact location only WW" also speaks.