"The 35-year-old saga of Kryptos, an enigmatic sculpture containing four encrypted messages outside the CIA headquarters, just took a bizarre twist. Though cryptographers broke the first three passages in the 1990s, just a few years after artist Jim Sanborn erected the copper monolith, the fourth, known as K4, remained a 97-character fortressthat is, until September 2, when journalists Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne discovered the answer in the Smithsonian archives."
"The core challenge of cryptography is to send a secret message securely in the presence of eavesdroppers. The strategy always involves the same ingredients: The message, called the plaintext, gets distorted (the encryption) so that anybody who intercepts it sees only garbled gibberish (the ciphertext). Ideally only those with a secret key can decrypt it. If you share your secret key with the intended recipient and nobody else, then you can, in theory, communicate with them in code."
Kryptos is an enigmatic copper sculpture outside CIA headquarters that contains four encrypted messages. Cryptographers solved the first three passages in the 1990s, while the fourth passage, K4, remained a 97-character mystery for 35 years until an archival discovery on September 2. Cryptography transforms plaintext into ciphertext so eavesdroppers see only garbled text, relying on secret keys for decryption. Secure key sharing enables private communication. Cryptography underpins everyday financial transactions and online communication. Early ciphers like the Caesar cipher shift letters by a fixed amount and illustrate why simple systems fail against analysis.
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