Cyrillic Projector Code Finally Cracked

SimuAndy writes "An international group of cryptographers, the Kryptos Group, announced this week that the decade-old Cyrillic Projector Code has been cracked, and that it deciphers to some classified KGB instructions and correspondence. The Cyrillic Projector is an encrypted sculpture at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, that was created by Washington DC artist James Sanborn in the early 1990s. It was inspired by the encrypted Kryptos sculpture that Sanborn created two years earlier for CIA Headquarters. The message on the Cyrillic Projector has turned out to be in two parts. The decrypted first part is a Russian text encouraging secret agents to psychologically control potential sources of information. The second part appears to be a partial quote from classified KGB correspondence about the Soviet dissident Sakharov, with concerns that his report to the Pugwash conference was being used by the Americans for an anti-Soviet agenda."

Would there not...

have been ex-KGB agents that could have told them the code anyway?

Silicon

A cryptographic statue? Whatever next! Cryptographic silicon?

the sad truth

In other news, the KGB has filed a lawsuit against the Kryptos Group under the DMCA, claiming that their IP has now been stolen.

The sad part of this is that in today's world somrthing similar could happen.

Re:the sad truth

> In other news, the KGB has filed a lawsuit against the Kryptos Group under the DMCA, claiming that their IP has now been stolen.

In Soviet Russia, KGB doesn't enforce the DMCA!

Kryptos

It sounds like a crypto module in KDE.

I broke cyrillic text

and All I got was this lousy T-Shirt!

In other news

Cyrillic code crackers have been arrested by the FBI under the DMCA.

Is it still legal?

Did they manage not to violate any of the new laws in the process?

From the article

the decade-old Cyrillic Projector Code has been cracked, and that it deciphers to some classified KGB instructions and correspondence.

Thank goodness for that decade-old KGB info. The Cold War will be ours!

Actual translation

The decrypted first part is a Russian text encouraging secret agents to psychologically control potential sources of information.

The actual translation is:
Keep information away from Moose and Squirrel.

All that time...

But, if anybody really wanted to know what it was, all they had to do was put a gun to the artists head. Some people just like doing it the hardway I guess.

Rubber Hose Cryptography

Actually this is a real technique. It's called "Rubber Hose Cryptography". A few hours beating someone with a rubber hose can be considerably more effective at cracking keys than a supercomputer.

Damiano

This just in, ROT-13 deciphered!

How difficult is this puzzle? "Not very," Sanborn says. Not nearly as difficult
as his first encoded sculpture -- a work called "Kryptos" that he created for CIA
headquarters in Langley, Va., in 1987. That code, created with the help of a
cryptographer, is so hard to break that the CIA "will never figure it out," he says.

So why is this news for anyone not on the UNC campus?

Re:This just in, ROT-13 deciphered!

How difficult is this puzzle? "Not very," Sanborn says. Not nearly as difficult as his first encoded sculpture -- a work called "Kryptos" that he created for CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., in 1987. That code, created with the help of a cryptographer, is so hard to break that the CIA "will never figure it out," he says.

So why is this news for anyone not on the UNC campus?

The person who actually decrypted this (Frank Corr) doesn't really think it's that big of a deal. It did fall to fairly standard cryptanalysis. We tried to get my 80 year-old mother to help translate it. But, given her failing eyesight, the fact that all the words are run together, and that her Russian is a little rusty, we gave up on that.

He finally put up his untranslated solution on the web last week, but didn't announce it to anyone. Elonka noticed it in her referral logs and decided to make a big announcement of it.

Besides not thinking it's such a big deal, Frank is also worried that the FBI keeps a file on anybody interested in cryptography!

Re:This just in, ROT-13 deciphered!

In fact, half the answer was posted on the wall [elonka.com], right next to that big blob of gum.

Part 5 of the code is even harder

I hvae a wnodreulfly tirvial slooiutn but trhee is not enugoh room in the mgrain of tihs book to dsecbire it.

At last!

Now the Cold War will finally be over!

Ah, wait, you mean this Iraq operation is not an extension of the Cold War? Why is it going on, then? Why are they cracking the KGB code? :D

Congrats

Congrats to Elonka and crew on decoding it. We all hope you figure out that last section of Kryptos!

Congrats.

I have not heard of the sculpture or the problem before, however, the article talks of using pictures -- piecing them together -- is it unavailable to the viewing public (close up)?

Or was it a logistic problem of distance?

I also assume that the "meaning" of the text is that somehow, while breaking the code, you are the creator's source? There is the physical piece and then the art is the effort in breaking the problem. Does this mean the piece is less transfixing since we know what it says?

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

Mirror to solution.

Here [elonka.com] is the 'mirrored' solution.

modern art

I've seen this cryptographic art all over in the modern art museums. There're paintings, statues, you name it. You can look at them for hours and still not know what the hell they are.

Cyrillic Projector Code...

Isn't that what SCO uses for it's code presentations?

Misuninterpreted

I parsed the story title as announcing that the good guys had finally finished decrypting the font transformation used to obfuscate the source code that SCO projected on screen at that big press conference a few weeks ago. Silly me.

Finally!

It's about time! This kept me awake at night not knowing what it said.

I for one welcome our encrypted overlords

Rapelcgvba vf sha naq tbbq sbe n ynhtu.

Vg znxrf vg fb gung crbcyr pna'g ernq zl zvaq.

Zl Gva sbvy ung vf abg pbzcyrgryl sbby cebbs nsgre nyy.

But I thought...

...that Bruce Perens cracked this weeks ago [slashdot.org].

I go to school there

I go to school at UNCC, I never really spent much time looking at that thing. Now i'm going to have a look at it. I always thought it was kinda cool, but just some artsy crap.

SURPRISE!

It wsa neevr rlaely eeyrcntpd. It was mdae by smoonee woh hda a rllaey bda csae of dxlsiyea. Tihs is nto a cniocdicconee scnie tihs wsa reltncey plbuhseid on Shsalodt.

exactly

Exactly.

Open standard mean's that there is inter-operability. not ... "lookie! this is how you decode HBO and Skinemax!"

The only thing that has somewhat stemmed the cable TV piracy problems is that it's illegal for you to own a Digital Cable box. if you bought one off ebay then you bought stolen goods.

Otherwise the DCT 3000 and 5000 , the most standard of the cable digital boxes in america would have been cracked wide open for everyone. Just like the crappy Jerrold and older cable boxes that were analog with some really lame digital scrambling sending a code to turn on the descrambler. (IVSS... inverted video supressed sync with the sync wandering around a bit.)

It's a great idea, EXCEPT I am sure it's a way to enforce the broadcast flag. if they can control your TV set then they can control what you can and cant watch. suddenly your DVHS copy of the 2007 Superbowl only play's audio with a black screen that says "UNAUTHORIZED"

no thank you.

Code Craker Likes Slashdot

Have a look at Elonka Dunin, one of the coordinators of the team that cracked this beast. Is that slashdot on her screen? [elonka.com] I think it is ;)

-AP

School

Wow, my school [uncc.edu] has recieved the honor of being mentioned in a Slashdot story. The Cyrillic Projector is next to the Fretwell [uncc.edu] building, across from the Friday [uncc.edu] building (home the capitalistic College of Buisness). It looks kind of boring during the day when it is not lit up, so most might not notice it.

Can someone make this into a lampshade?

It would be kinda cheesy like a copy of "The Scream" on a throw pillow I have. However, it would be so cool to have a conversation piece like this on my desk. Thinkgeek people... call Sanborn and get cracking, I want one for Christmas... Who else does?

and the secret code reads......

Dear Comradski, send more Vodka.
thank you,
Nikoli out....

Hmmm..

Dosen't this violate the DMCA?????

Pictures

I just ran out and took some pictures [uncc.edu] if you wanted to see what it looks like in the day. It's much more interesting at night when the letters are projected all over.

I walk by this thing twice a week

I'm a student at UNC-C...I walked by that projector twice a week for a few months, noticed it was cyrillic alphabet on the sculpture...to my knowlege no one in day to day life has any clue what the thing is, or that its even a code

uncc sculpture

I used to teach in the art department at UNCC, (before this work was installed). The school has always made a good committment to public sculpture.
Most people on that campus probably don't pay much attention to the artworks around them, which is too bad. Still, it's nice to see a work from the collection there capture people's imagination and enthusiasm.

I used to walk by

I used to walk by that thing every day on the way to class and I never knew it was a code! I thought it was just art for art's sake. Silly me.

Roman letters for Cyrillic letters.

How do you represent some other Russian words but instead of using Cyrillic letters using similar Roman letters?...

For example... PECTOPAH
XOPOWO
xopowo

the CIA teddy bear for kids

Has anyone checked out the CIA teddybear [cia.gov]? The CIA are showing kids the important work they do.

This was decrypted

JUST in time! Thank god!

I broke the code

and I still dont understand a word!

Re:a little offtopic but here's a related article

It's a non-subscriber link.

Odd that it says THE PAGE YOU REQUESTED IS AVAILABLE ONLY TO SUBSCRIBERS when I click on it, then. (I suspect this is why it was modded down. I have points and was going to bring it back up if it was relevant, but I can't read it.)

text of the article

COMMENTARY

The KGB's Man

By ION MIHAI PACEPA

The Israeli government has vowed to expel Yasser Arafat, calling him an "obstacle" to peace. But the 72-year-old Palestinian leader is much more than that; he is a career terrorist, trained, armed and bankrolled by the Soviet Union and its satellites for decades.

Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world's "kings, queens & despots," with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

* * *
"I invented the hijackings [of passenger planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met him at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in the early 1970s. He gestured toward the little red flags pinned on a wall map of the world that labeled Israel as "Palestine." "There they all are!" he told me, proudly. The dubious honor of inventing hijacking actually goes to the KGB, which first hijacked a U.S. passenger plane in 1960 to Communist Cuba. Arafat's innovation was the suicide bomber, a terror concept that would come to full flower on 9/11.

In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services' priority list, including mine. Bucharest's role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington -- as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day -- believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak.

KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naive enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace.

Right after that meeting, I was given the KGB's "personal file" on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.

The KGB's disinformation department then went to work on Arafat's four-page tract called "Falastinuna" (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students. The KGB was adept at magazine publication and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists in our international front organizations. High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a "personal hero" for him -- the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was "proud no end" to

Re:Aliens

wtf?!?!

Re:I guess I'm the first to say it...

In Soviet Russia, your crack codes?

Agreed: Aliens Would Laugh

If I were an alien, and observed your species making sculptural encryptions, I'd probably laugh.