Overview:
A lot of the online data surrounding Kryptos and other Sanborn Projects isn’t just confusing, it is at times flat out wrong. This collection of pages will aim to clear out much of that confusion, writing solutions out in plain English that isn’t only easy to follow, but verifiable by ‘blind code’ that receives the encrypted text, the steps to solve it, and will output the decrypted plain text. In doing so I hope to clear up some general misinformation and allow accessible and easily understood solutions to verifying these complex and often misunderstood ciphers.
In Depth Explanations:
Quagmire III Not Double Vigenère Explanation
Solution Explained: Cyrillic Projector
Link Github: Coming shortly <3
Speculation:
I have always viewed Kryptos and similar projects like Cicada 3301 as recruitment scenarios, and so have many others. The result of which is people often times clinging onto what they feel is exclusive information, or, lying by omission, or, intentionally changing some details to keep solutions just out of reach from the public. Sometimes, this isn’t intentional, there’s a lot of complexity going on here. But at other times, it absolutely is intentional. So if you see a source, and they’re not able to explain things in plain English, I would encourage you to question the methodology if it can’t meet what you’re seeing here.
What’s the point?:
I want to crack K4. Using AI would be a cool way to put a feather in my cap. You know, just casually shaking around the snowglobe that is the espionage industry. Simple as that, and you have to start somewhere. Learning about K1-K3 + The Cyrillic Projector was a way to gain insight into K4. There was no intention of going in expecting information to be stretched of fabricated at all, but the more I began to learn about how these systems work, the more it became clear that some explanations were either heavily lacking or may have been mistaken. So, research and scientific methods are pretty standard, all we’ve done here is run the math in a ‘blind scenario’, where the code has no idea of the outcome, only the starting point and the math to apply. That alone has done a lot to help verify exactly what’s going on ‘behind the curtain’. My goal is to make these solutions more accessible and more easily understood to the public, and also to clear up some of the common misconceptions that float about.
So it’s all AI?
Yes, but no, but yes. It is AI in that this is a study being done between two individuals, myself, and an AI system. I was inspired by some articles claiming K4 had been ‘solved’ by AI, but these looked to be more ‘guessing games’ where the AI assumes the solution to K4 based on context clues like characters. Specifically, with using LLMs. I wanted to try a different approach, where a micromodel or an LLM isn’t just guessing, but crafting the proper code to brute force a solution.
We’ve managed to do this with K1-K3 + The Cyrillic Projector, and verify some inconsistencies in some of the writeups as a result. As of writing this, this has allowed us to build a framework using AI that will attempt to brute force a solution to K4.
AI is not one of the world’s leading cryptographic experts. Neither am I. There is however one thing AI does really well that I also enjoy! Pattern recognition! My thought is that by using what we’ve learned from K1-K3 + The Cyrillic Projector, I’ll be able to work with AI to develop the best solutions, shore up my knowledge gaps, and publicly document the results.
That’s it! See ya’, nerds.
- Eli