During the talk Elonka gave to the class on Friday, I found myself fixating on one thing, Kryptos. I was so surprised by the fact that there was a statue located on the grounds of the CIA, which has an unsolved code written on it. The CIA are supposed to be some of the greatest minds of our time, and they can’t solve a cipher that is quite literally sitting right in front of them.
To give a little more information, Kryptos is a large sculpture which contains four codes. Each of these codes was placed onto the sculpture by stamping through the metal, so that the letters are holes in the metal. The four codes were created by Ed Scheidt, who at the time was the Chairman of the CIA Cryptographic Center. The first three codes have been solved, by the public and from within the CIA, but the fourth remains a mystery.
The connection between Kryptos and our course is fairly obvious. Four encrypted messages, or codes, in a class about codemaking and codebreaking? Sounds like exactly what we’re looking for I think. It’s also worth mentioning that the first codes use a Vigenere cipher, something that we were discussing in class at the time Elonka came to visit. Vigenere ciphers were the code standard for quite some time, so it doesn’t surprise me at all that they were used for a sculpture as famous as Krpytos.
Many famously unsolved codes were solved at a much later time. With this famous code sitting in front of some of the world’s best codebreakers, I am sure that Kryptos will soon be cracked. Maybe Elonka will be the one to solve Kryptos, or maybe even one of the students of our course.
Here’s a link to her Kryptos page: http://elonka.com/kryptos/
