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

Schmeh's cryptogram finally solved after 6 years!

Heureka, the cryptogram that was published in 2007 by Klaus Schmeh [1] was finally solved on 26.11.2013 by George Lasry. MysterieTwister (user: george4096) made today the official announcement about his achievement.



Over 6 years Schmeh's cryptogram resisted all attacks despite it is based on a cipher that can be executed with pencil and paper. Because of its difficulty it was brought to public attention in various forms, e.g. [2,3]. Schmeh did not chose the puzzle in an arbitrary way. No, it was particularly well chosen according to the rules from the former BSI president Otto Leiberich. Based on the cryptanalysis knowledge at that time, the parameters were picked in a way to make the cryptogram as hard as possible. This means for example to take $2$ keys of length $> 20$ that create incomplete rectangles during encryption.

In the post Double Columnar Transposition i talked about various methods to attack this type of cipher and also made some statements about the cryptopuzzle from Schmeh. Then George Lasry made comments to my blog post and we exchanged several e-mails talking about his approach and ideas to increase efficiency. He told me, that he worked since a few month on that puzzle after having extensively studied the single transposition and the ADFGX cipher before. I guess that brought him in the right position to be ready for Schmeh's cryptogram.

Congratulations to him! 

Details of his approach will follow as soon as his official paper is accepted.

[1] Klaus Schmeh, Codeknacker gegen Codemacher: Die faszinierende Geschichte der Verschlüsselung, 414 Seiten, 2007
[2] http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/26/26876/1.html
[3] Klaus Schmeh, Nicht zu knacken, 296 Seiten, 2012, Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG 
Labels:

Comments

  1. Anonymous11/29/2013 03:38:00 PM

    Hi Chris

    Thank you for your kind words.

    Thanks in particular for your insights on how a key chosen from a key-phrase (such as "thisisakeyphrase") differs from a randomly chosen key (such as "bhjiadfegklmc"), which helps to improve the efficiency of key search.

    I also enjoyed your original article, which shows a deep understanding of the very complex mechanisms involved a such a resilient code as the Double Transposition, probably the hardest type of manual code.

    Good luck with your research!.

    Regards
    George

    ReplyDelete
  2. Christian Schridde11/29/2013 05:24:00 PM

    Hi George,

    it was a pleasure to help you and if you have another project going and need some ideas for a new direction, feel free to send me an e-mail.

    Regards,
    Chris

    ReplyDelete

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