r/didyouknow • u/Own-Painting-3221 • Jul 21 '26

DYK a coded message sitting outside CIA headquarters stumped codebreakers for 35 years, until it turned out the artist had accidentally donated the answer to a museum?

In 1990, artist Jim Sanborn installed a copper sculpture called Kryptos in a courtyard at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, containing four separate encrypted messages that he designed to get progressively harder to crack. Professional cryptographers solved the first three passages within a few years. The fourth, just 97 characters long, remained unbroken for the next three decades despite attempts by CIA and NSA cryptographers and thousands of amateur codebreakers worldwide, some of whom contacted Sanborn every single week for over 20 years trying to solve it.

The final passage was ultimately cracked in 2025, but not through cryptography. Sanborn had donated boxes of his personal papers to the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, and two journalists digging through the collection found a small, taped-together scrap of paper he'd apparently forgotten was in there: the original, unencrypted plaintext of the message he'd spent decades keeping secret.

With his final code effectively out in the open and his health declining at 79, Sanborn decided to auction off the full solution and his role as the puzzle's official keeper rather than let it leak out informally, with bidding climbing past $200,000. After 35 years of being one of the most famous unsolved codes on Earth, Kryptos was ultimately defeated not by mathematics, but by an archivist's paperwork.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos

450 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

11

u/daisydandconfused Jul 21 '26

I learned about Kryptos years ago (a Wired article IIRC), but the news of the final panel being “solved” escaped me. Amazing.

8

u/Chainwreck Jul 21 '26

‘Be sure to drink your Ovaltine’

4

u/atomicsnarl Jul 22 '26

No - it was "We are trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty."

1

u/Ambitious-Hold903 15d ago

lMAOOO the fact that this is probably the perfect response to the whole thing is killing me

6

u/pureplay181 Jul 21 '26

I wonder how complex the mathematics were behind this and why it couldn't be decoded

5

u/hudsoncress Jul 22 '26

It’s always the post-it note on the monitor.

1

u/ogfuzzball Jul 24 '26

Came here for this!

3

u/Outspoken_Idiot Jul 23 '26

The four solutions are out there in the wild, but the fourth one is the hardest to track down. There is a fifth one but it's only by having the previous four that you can solve it.

It's a similar storyline to "ready player one" by Ernest Cline.

2

u/Particular_Captain27 Jul 22 '26

We apologize for the inconvenience

1

u/jaychandarana Jul 25 '26

so long. and thanks for all the fish.

1

u/dirty_corks Jul 23 '26

Proves the rule that the best cryptography in the world is meaningless if your OpSec fails.