kryptos sculpture
Sarah Scott
Updated on July 06, 2026
The documents show that by June 1993, a small group of NSA cryptanalysts had succeeded in solving the first three passages of the sculpture. The above attempts to solve Kryptos all had found that passage 2 ended with WESTIDBYROWS.
What does the Kryptos sculpture say?
Inscribed on Kryptos, a sculpture erected on the intelligence agency’s grounds in 1991, the code consists of 865 letters and four question marks punched into a curved wall of copper.
Has the Kryptos sculpture been solved 2021?
While the sculpture containing all of the scrambled letters is public, no one has cracked the complete code in the three decades it’s been standing. Part of the reason why this thing hasn’t been solved yet is because the guy who created the Kryptos sculpture, as it’s called, is an artist—not a cryptographer by trade.
What is the 4th Kryptos?
Kryptos is a sculpture located on the grounds of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Installed in 1990 by artist James Sanborn, its 1800 characters contain encrypted messages, of which three have been solved. There is still a fourth section at the bottom consisting of 97 or 98 characters which remains uncracked.
What is the Kryptos message?
Kryptos, a sculpture in a courtyard at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va., holds an encrypted message that has not fully yielded to attempts to crack it. It’s been nearly 30 years since its tall scroll of copper with thousands of punched-through letters was set in place.
What are Kryptos codes?
Sanborn, the creator of Kryptos, has grown impatient that the last section of Kryptos has not been solved. In 2010 he released a clue and revealed that one six word section of letters were code for the word “BERLIN.” Still no one could solve it.
Who is WW in Kryptos?
x Layer two.” WW, Sanborn told WIRED in 2005, refers to William Webster, director of the CIA at the time of the sculpture’s completion.
What do ciphers do?
A cipher uses a system of fixed rules — an encryption algorithm — to transform plaintext, a legible message, into ciphertext, an apparently random string of characters. Ciphers can be designed to encrypt or decrypt bits in a stream, known as stream ciphers.
What does Iqlusion mean?
[Iqlusion is an intentional misspelling of “illusion.”] Passage 2 also employs a Vigenère cipher, but utilizes a different keyword than Passage 1. The message, also composed by Sanborn, points toward something hidden nearby: It was totally invisible.
Who cracked the Kryptos code?
The popular story of Kryptos has long held that CIA analyst David Stein was the first to crack three of the cryptographic sculpture’s four puzzles in 1998. Stein decrypted the coded messages after spending some 400 hours’ worth of lunch hours working through the puzzles using only paper and pencil.