I want to just focus on K0, K1, and K2 for a moment and get everyone’s thoughts on if these things feel like plausible ways to derive the passwords from K0 and K1 for K1 and K2.
There’s no funny math here even though there’d be some ways to write it out. This was all found with like 150ish lines of code that basically had the computer cross reference certain slices of encrypted and decrypted text, and test them against a handful of very specific patterns. IE: Bigrams, trigrams, mirrors, and IOC spikes using column shifts. I’m going to start with K2s password because the math and readout is the most clearcut.
K2:
Clues needed: ALLYINVISIBLE [more code hidden hint within virtuALLYinvisible] + KRYPTOSABCDE…[modified alphabet key]
Method: Column shift + subtraction [encrypted text – key = modified alphabet key value as output] Value: 8
Steps:
Make an alphabetic key KRYPTOSABCDEF… assign a numerical value to it 01234567…
Write out the encrypted text and write ALLYINVISIBLE beneath it [partial text shown for clarity]
VFPJUDEEHZWETZYVGWHKKQETGFQJNCE…
ALLYINVISIBLESubtract ALLYINVISIBLE values from the ENCRYPTED TEXT values, make sure to assign values based on the modified alphabet key.
Slide password down 8 characters from the start of the ENCRYPTED TEXT
VFPJUDEEHZWETZYVGWHKKQETGFQJNCE…
ALLYINVISIBLECalculate values
Assign numerical value on the running alphabet:
K1:
Clues needed: Morse code from k0+ Palindrome hunt
Steps:
Write out morse code drop final two blocks, list the first mirrors and middle letter for each mirror:
| Line (left → right scan) | first mirror you meet | middle letter |
| EEVIRTUALLYE | LL | L |
| EEEEEEINVISIBLE | ISI | S |
| DIGETALEEE | none (skip) | – |
| INTERPRETATIT | ERPRE (length 5) | P |
| (same word) … TAT … | TAT | A |
| (same word) … TIT | TIT | I |
| EESHADOWEE | AHA | H (we’ll not use H) |
| FORCESEEEEE | ESE | S |
| LUCIDEEE | DEE (even pair) | E? (we’ll grab a better M in a second) |
| MEMORYE | MEM | E |
| (same word) MEME… | EME | M |
| POSITIONE | ITI | T |
| SOS | SOS | (O – not needed) |
Result:
PALIMHSEST E vs PALIMPSEST
Obviously, this is just a misspelling of the actual key needed to solve K1 but it would be more than enough to get started as it’s already really close. That necessary tweak to the spelling is an easily conquered hurdle.
This is the simplest method for getting water out of the rocks of K0 for K1.
A more convoluted method to solve K1 without a key comes from using a similar method as K2 [described below] with extra steps. Standard running alphabet, no mods, kryptos as a key. Write encrypted text, write Kryptos beneath, subtract the values for a new string of encrypted letters. Then evaluate each column as a new puzzle, where each letter in the column becomes a new shift based on its correspondence to the letter E, this allows you to get a vowel+bigram+trigram score from each column. Rank the winners, then take the top letter from each column and do the same subtraction math we’ve been doing. But honestly, at that point, you might as well brute force it. So I wouldn’t count on this being the intention.