Presented at
DEF CON 12 (2004),
July 31, 2004, 5 p.m.
(50 minutes)
In a courtyard at CIA Headquarters stands an encrypted sculpture called Kryptos. Its thousands of characters contain encoded messages, three of which have been solved. The fourth part, 97 or 98 characters at the very bottom, have withstood cryptanalysis for over a decade. The artist who created Kryptos, James Sanborn, has also created other encrypted sculptures such as the decade-old Cyrillic Projector, which was cracked last September by an international team led by Elonka Dunin. This talk is intended for a general audience with beginning to intermediate cryptographic experience. Elonka will go over how the code was cracked, and the current state of knowledge about the Kryptos sculpture, its own encrypted messages, and its mysterious CIA surroundings.
Presenters:
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Elonka Dunin
Elonka was born in Los Angeles, studied Astronomy at UCLA, and then joined the United States Air Force, where she worked on the SR-71 and U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. Elonka is a world-traveler who speaks multiple languages, and has visited scores of countries around the world, and every continent (yes, including Antarctica). She has won awards for cracking various codes, such as when she cracked the PhreakNIC v3.0 Code, an up-until-Elonka unsolved puzzle created by se2600. Since September 11th, Elonka has also been helping out with the war on terrorism by teaching government agents about cryptography and what types of codes that Al Qaeda may be using. She is co-founder of the Kryptos Group, an online group of cryptographers and interested hobbyists trying to crack the last part of the code on the famous Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters.
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