Skip to main content

Featured Post

Ed Scheidts Mayan Symbols - Can we solve the puzzle?

In this post I want to talk about a thing from the Kryptos universe that are not directly related to the statue. But i think it may be an indirect hint to some Kryptos related methods. The Mayan Symbols in Ed Scheidts driveway I think everyone who knows Kryptos knows Ed Scheidt. The former Chairman of the Cryptographic Center at the CIA and founder of the cryptosystems used around the Kryptos statue. As already shown in Part 4 of my Kryptos series, in the driveway of Ed Scheidts house, there are two symbols: Figure 1 - Garage driveway of Ed Scheidt We denote the left symbol set with $S_1$ and the right one with $S_2$. It took me a while to find his house on Google Maps - Street View. To save you some time, here is the link with a view on the driveway. I you go back in time in Streetview, you can see that the symbols were already there in 2012. But it is impossible to say when they were built. $S_1$ is clearly visible from the street, $S_2$ is hidden in the view. But you can u...
12 comments

The Dorabella Cipher (Part 4)

Ok, let us shortly recall what we know:
  1. As far as I know, all existing images of the Dorabella cipher do not show Elgar's original message, but Penny's rewritten version, which she published in her memoirs. Perhaps this act of rewriting removed some information that might have been helpful. For example: the orientation of the symbols; the length of the lines; since a horizontally reversed symbol is also a valid symbol, perhaps she wrote everything upside down; sometimes the cipher symbols are ambiguous, did she get the right direction of each symbol? etc...
  2. Elgar used his cipher symbols at least four times: Lisz-Fragment, Courage Card set, Dorabella cipher, notebook.
  3. The suggested solution(s) for each of these parts do not fit together, i.e., a solutions for the Lisz fragment can not directly be applied to the, e.g., dorabella cipher. 
  4. This either means that those solutions are wrong, or that Elgar slightly varies his system each time, or that Elgar just uses his symbols as a replacement for the alphabet and executes each time a different encryption method, and those do not have anything in common except these symbols.
  5. The only more or less convincing solution is the one from Tim Roberts, but which has shortcomings in its explanation how Elgar derived the mapping from a letter to a cipher symbol.
  6. The last usage of his symbols was 23 years after he wrote the Dorabella cipher. In his notebook he wrote several possible orderings of his cipher symbols and also encrypted a few words. Figure 1 shows again this notebook page.
    One additional thing he does on this page is, that he writes the sentence "DO YOU GO TO LONDON TOMORROW" on the left side and counts the number of the occurrences of the letter "O". Is the related to his encryption method?
Figure 1. Elgars notebook.

A simple assumption. If we assume that he indeed used a similar alphabet to cipher symbol mapping as shown in the notebook, whereby "similar" means: three consecutive letters from the alphabet are always mapped to three equal oriented cipher symbols with an increasing number of cusps.
In that case, you could build up matrix, from which you could potentially eyeball a solution. This assumption is not totally unrealistic but its too simple and if it would be true, such a mapping would probably already have been found. But it is an easy to use improvement to test substitutions for someone who does not want to spend much time in coding.

Nevertheless, i want to present this method shortly, therewith you understand the excel file i want to share with you.
Figure 2. Lisz-Fragment
Take the Lisz-Fragement from Figure 2. Since we assume that a 3-cusps symbol is always the last symbol in a block, such a cipher symbol represents the set $$ (*)\;\text{3-cusps} = \{C,F,I,M,P,S,W,Z\} $$ Like-wise, the 2-cusp symbols represents $$ (**)\;\text{2-cusps} = \{B,E,H,L,O,R,U,Y\} $$ and last but not least,  the 1-cusps symbol $$ (***)\;\text{1-cusps} = \{A,D,G,K,N,Q,T,X\}$$.
We adopt the usual notation, that each cipher symbol is associated with the integer $xy$, whereof $x$ stands for the number of cusps and $y$ is the orientation, that is $1$ is up, going clockwise until $8$, which is upper-left.
Using this particular arrangement from (*), (**) and (***), one could build the following matrix:
\begin{array}{c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c}
1&2&3&4&5&6&7&8&9&10&11&12&13&14&15&16&17&18\\
  &  &  &  & &3& &1&2&  &  &4&3&2& & & & \\
44&35&48&21&38&48&25&44&35&45&34&21&48&35&46&31&28&22\\
\hline
C&B&C&A&B&C&A&C&B&C&B&B&A&C&B&C&B&A\\
F&E&F&D&E&F&D&F&E&F&E&E&D&F&E&F&E&D\\
I&H&I&G&H&I&G&I&H&I&H&H&G&I&H&I&H&G\\
M&L&M&K&L&M&K&M&L&M&L&L&K&M&L&M&L&K\\
P&O&P&N&O&P&N&P&O&P&O&O&N&P&O&P&O&N\\
S&R&S&Q&R&S&Q&S&R&S&R&R&Q&S&R&S&R&Q\\
W&U&W&T&U&W&T&W&U&W&U&U&T&W&U&W&U&T\\
Z&Y&Z&X&Y&Z&X&Z&Y&Z&Y&Y&X&Z&Y&Z&Y&X\\
\end{array}
The first line numbers each column, the second line indicates if the cipher symbol is equal to a previous one. That means, those columns depend on the previous choice and must be skipped.

We start at column one and try to build a word or sentence by going from column to column and hoping from row to row. In each dependent row (gray), the same letter must be used as in the previous column with the same cipher symbol. You can not use a letter twice if the cipher symbols are different. I.e. the beginning "I L I K E" is not possible, since in column $1$ and $3$ the $I$ is picked, but the cipher symbols differ.

I wrote a little excel sheet, which you can DOWNLOAD, that does all this for you. It fills the depend columns and removes already chosen letter from the columns if they were picked previously. If you can not find a proper sentence, you can vary the columns by changing the association between the letter set and the cusps symbols shown in (*), (**) and (***).

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kryptos - The Cipher (Part 4) - Correctly positioned decryption of the word BERLIN

EASTNORTHEAST - This is not exactly the hint Jim Sanborn (JS) gave for K4 on the 29th of January this year. He only gave NORTHEAST - which refers to the positions 26-34 of K4's plaintext.  Beside BERLIN and CLOCK it is the third revealed plaintext word of K4. However, also this hint does not seem to help much.  However, it just so happened, that a member in the yahoo kryptos group had a conversation with Jim Sanborn due to a submitted solution. Sandborn's answer to the question contained again the last clue which surprisingly was EASTNORTHEAST at position 22-34. Jim Sanborns compass rose at CIA There is disagreement if Jim revealed this on purpose or he did it accidentially, but the new extended clue seem to be serious and valid.Interestingly, EASTNORTHEAST is exactly the direction which is illustrated on the compass rose on one of the stones around kryptos, also created by Jim Sanborn. Actually, i dont really kn...
116 comments
Read more

Kryptos - The Cipher (Part 1) - Introduction

Introduction. Since I think that KRYPTOS does not need any introduction, I will only give you a brief description of one of the most famous and only partially solved ciphers known today: KRYPTOS - Von Jim Sanborn - Jim Sanborn, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8253447 KRYPTOS was constructed in Nov. 1990 on the ground of the CIA Headquarter in Langley, Virginia by Jim Sanborn It contains 4 ciphers (K1,K2,K3,K4) on its left side and some kind of Vigenère-Table on its right side K1, K2 and K3 were solved by James Gillogly in 1999. Afterwards, the CIA and later the NSA claimed that they had a solution to the first three ciphers at an earlier point in time Ed Scheidt, a cryptoanalyst and former director of the CIA, gave Sanborn the input of possible cryptographic techniques to use K1 is a variant of the Vigenère-Cipher (Quagmire 3) with the codewords KRYPTOS and PALIMPSES...
7 comments
Read more

Kryptos - The Cipher (Part 3)

This post is about is more or less a collection of several approaches and facts that has been said as well as some speculations. B-ary integer representation According to [1] during a Question and Answer round, Jim Sanborn was asked again about the hint BERLIN. The question was if N decodes to B, Y decodes to E, etc, etc. and Jim confirmed it does. Emphatically . It is written, that Jim Sanborn rattled through the entire crib: \begin{align}   \texttt{N} &\stackrel{\text{decode}}{\rightarrow} \texttt{B} \\   \texttt{Y} &\stackrel{\text{decode}}{\rightarrow}  \texttt{E} \\   \texttt{P} &\stackrel{\text{decode}}{\rightarrow}  \texttt{R} \\   \texttt{V} &\stackrel{\text{decode}}{\rightarrow}  \texttt{L} \\   \texttt{T} &\stackrel{\text{decode}}{\rightarrow}  \texttt{I} \\   \texttt{T} &\stackrel{\text{decode}}{\rightarrow}  \texttt{N} \end{align} When the same q...
1 comment
Read more