Crypto Guys Bought the Answer to the CIA’s Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture
Crypto Guys Bought the Answer to the CIA’s Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture
加密货币圈人士买下了中情局神秘雕塑“Kryptos”的答案
On a blustery March day, the artist Jim Sanborn received visitors at his studio on an isolated island in the Chesapeake Bay. The visitors sat him down in front of a laptop, and he typed in a secret message. They compressed the message using a unique hash function, sent that to the cloud, and wiped the laptop clean. Sanborn hoped that this action would set him free. But did it? 在一个狂风大作的3月天，艺术家吉姆·桑伯恩（Jim Sanborn）在切萨皮克湾一座与世隔绝的小岛工作室里接待了几位访客。访客让他坐在一台笔记本电脑前，他输入了一条秘密信息。他们使用一种独特的哈希函数对该信息进行了压缩，将其发送到云端，随后彻底清除了电脑上的数据。桑伯恩希望这一举动能让他获得解脱。但事实真的如此吗？
That’s the latest twist in the story of Kryptos, the famous Sanborn sculpture that’s been sitting outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, since 1990. The artwork is a copper S-curve that stands 9 feet, 11 inches tall, into which Sanborn had punched four panels of encrypted text. Professional and amateur cryptanalysts alike have been trying to crack the code ever since. Within a decade, three of the panels were solved—but not the 97-character fourth panel, known as K4. For decades, Sanborn has been fielding solutions, every one of them wrong. On the one hand, the mystery of his message was a brilliant reflection of the intelligence community’s work. On the other, it’s been a burden; in recent years he’s been deluged by cockamamie, AI-assisted submissions. 这就是“Kryptos”故事的最新转折。这座著名的桑伯恩雕塑自1990年起就矗立在弗吉尼亚州兰利市的中情局总部外。这件艺术品是一个9英尺11英寸高的铜制S形曲线，桑伯恩在上面刻下了四块加密文本。自那时起，专业和业余的密码分析师们就一直试图破解这些代码。十年内，其中三块面板已被破解，但那块包含97个字符的第四块面板（即K4）至今未解。几十年来，桑伯恩一直在处理各种破解方案，但无一正确。一方面，他信息的神秘性巧妙地映射了情报界的工作；另一方面，这也成了一种负担；近年来，他被大量荒谬的、由人工智能辅助生成的提交方案淹没了。
Sanborn had had enough. The 80-year-old artist also wanted a boost to his retirement fund. So in 2025 he arranged for an auction house to sell off the answer to K4—as well as the solution to K5, an additional panel that hasn’t been revealed. In November, the highest bidders paid almost a million dollars for the prize, which included a mini-model of the sculpture and other ephemera. Sanborn took home $770,000. The identity of the winners and their plans for Kryptos were yet another secret—until now. 桑伯恩受够了。这位80岁的艺术家也想为自己的退休金增加一些收入。因此，他在2025年安排了一家拍卖行出售K4的答案，以及尚未公开的额外面板K5的解决方案。11月，最高出价者支付了近100万美元赢得了这一奖项，其中包括该雕塑的微缩模型和其他纪念品。桑伯恩最终入账77万美元。获胜者的身份以及他们对Kryptos的计划曾是另一个秘密——直到现在。
Today the winner is stepping out of the shadows. Paradigm, a crypto-focused VC firm, is taking over the job of vetting guesses until some genius finally solves the puzzle. 今天，获胜者终于走出阴影。专注于加密货币的风险投资公司Paradigm接手了审核猜测的工作，直到有天才最终解开这个谜题。
Like nearly everything in the Kryptos saga, last year’s auction had some wild plot twists. Weeks before the deadline, two researchers, Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne, told Sanborn they had found the text of K4. The Smithsonian has Kryptos materials in its archives, and Byrne went to photograph the holdings. Kobek discovered in the photos that the artist had unintentionally included K4 plaintext in his papers. Ultimately, the researchers agreed not to release their solution, the Smithsonian locked down the archives, and the auction proceeded as planned. 就像Kryptos传奇中的几乎所有事情一样，去年的拍卖会也充满了疯狂的情节转折。在截止日期前几周，两位研究人员贾雷特·科贝克（Jarett Kobek）和理查德·伯恩（Richard Byrne）告诉桑伯恩，他们已经找到了K4的文本。史密森尼学会的档案中存有Kryptos的相关资料，伯恩去拍摄了这些馆藏。科贝克在照片中发现，艺术家无意中将K4的明文包含在了他的文件中。最终，研究人员同意不发布他们的解决方案，史密森尼学会封锁了档案，拍卖会按计划进行。
So who are these bidders? Paradigm was cofounded by a cofounder of Coinbase. The fund backs crypto-related companies, builds open-source software projects, and more recently has expanded into AI and robotics—a good call since Bitcoin is in free fall and the blockchain has lost its buzz. 那么这些竞标者是谁呢？Paradigm由Coinbase的一位联合创始人共同创立。该基金支持加密货币相关公司，构建开源软件项目，最近还扩展到了人工智能和机器人领域——这是一个明智的选择，因为比特币正处于自由落体状态，区块链也已失去了往日的热度。
Paradigm partner Dan Robinson sits at a table with items from artist Jim Sanborn’s private Kryptos archive. Courtesy of Paradigm Paradigm合伙人丹·罗宾逊（Dan Robinson）坐在桌前，桌上摆放着来自艺术家吉姆·桑伯恩私人Kryptos档案的物品。图片来源：Paradigm
Dan Robinson, who joined Paradigm in 2019, had been fascinated with cryptography since he was a kid. Last summer he read my article about the auction and began thinking that the firm should get involved. “There’s really nothing else like it,” he says. “It fit a lot of our philosophy about the kind of things we like to support in the world.” Plus, Robinson hopes that owning Kryptos will help attract top talent to the firm. 2019年加入Paradigm的丹·罗宾逊从小就对密码学着迷。去年夏天，他读了我关于拍卖的文章，开始认为公司应该参与其中。“真的没有其他类似的东西了，”他说。“它非常符合我们支持世界上某些事物的理念。”此外，罗宾逊希望拥有Kryptos能帮助公司吸引顶尖人才。
To encourage guesses and discourage brute-force attempts to crack the encrypted text, the firm will charge $1 per submission (Sanborn had been charging $50). Paradigm will also hold contests with increasingly difficult decoding challenges. The first to crack those puzzles will win $1,000. 为了鼓励猜测并抑制暴力破解加密文本的尝试，该公司将对每次提交收取1美元的费用（桑伯恩之前收费50美元）。Paradigm还将举办难度递增的解码挑战赛。第一个破解这些谜题的人将赢得1000美元。
The prize for solving K4 is not cash, but glory. Oh, and unique access to a video that Sanborn pretaped for the successful codebreaker. 破解K4的奖励不是现金，而是荣誉。哦，还有观看桑伯恩为成功破解者预先录制的视频的独特机会。
In theory, Kobek—the guy who found the answer at the Smithsonian—could blow all this up by publishing the plaintext of K4. But when I reached him this week, he reiterated his promise from last year: “There will never be a moment in which the plaintext is published by me.” 理论上，在史密森尼学会找到答案的科贝克可以通过发布K4的明文来破坏这一切。但当我本周联系他时，他重申了去年的承诺：“我绝不会发布明文。”
Robinson tells me that even the Paradigm people don’t know the answer to K4—they haven’t looked. Starting today, potential codebreakers can send their solutions to the new Kryptos website. Since the real answer was run through a hash function to generate a unique identifier, or hash, submissions will go through the same function. If the two hashes match, the long quest will be over. Sort of. 罗宾逊告诉我，即使是Paradigm内部的人也不知道K4的答案——他们还没看过。从今天开始，潜在的破解者可以将他们的解决方案发送到新的Kryptos网站。由于真正的答案是通过哈希函数生成唯一标识符（即哈希值）的，提交的内容也将经过相同的函数处理。如果两个哈希值匹配，这场漫长的探索就结束了。大概吧。
Along with the secret answers, the auction lot contained a model of the sculpture at CIA headquarters and other Kryptos ephemera. Courtesy of Paradigm 除了秘密答案外，拍卖品还包括中情局总部雕塑的模型和其他Kryptos纪念品。图片来源：Paradigm
There’s still the mystery of K5. Sanborn says that once K4 is solved, K5 will somehow become solvable. Exactly how is yet another Kryptos mystery. Robinson says that when the time comes, Paradigm will publish the encrypted K5 and invite people to crack it. K5的谜团依然存在。桑伯恩说，一旦K4被破解，K5将以某种方式变得可解。具体如何解开又是另一个Kryptos之谜。罗宾逊表示，当时机成熟时，Paradigm将发布加密的K5并邀请人们进行破解。
In theory, this ought to be closure for Sanborn. He has passed stewardship of his secrets. He’s handed the Paradigm people sealed envelopes containing the plaintext solutions to K4 and even K5, which they say they did not open. He’s cashed his check. But when I spoke to him, I sensed that he wasn’t really letting it go. 理论上，这对桑伯恩来说应该是一个了结。他已经移交了秘密的保管权。他将装有K4甚至K5明文解决方案的密封信封交给了Paradigm的人，他们声称没有打开过。他已经兑现了支票。但当我与他交谈时，我感觉到他并没有真正放下。
“I guarantee there will be people that don’t know anything about the auction, and I am going to tell them when they contact me to please contact Paradigm.” But knowing the Kryptos world, he suspects they may not listen. In that case, he won’t freeze them out. “I mean, I’m not shutting down my email,” he says. “People might still want me to, you know, look at it.” “我敢保证，肯定会有一些人根本不知道拍卖会的事，当他们联系我时，我会告诉他们请联系Paradigm。”但了解Kryptos圈子的人都知道，他怀疑他们可能不会听。在这种情况下，他也不会拒之门外。“我的意思是，我不会关闭我的邮箱，”他说。“人们可能还是希望我，你知道，看一眼。”
He speculates that he may even provide a teaser to the K5 ciphertext, by including it in a longer stream of scrambled characters in one of his public artworks—he’s been doing “projection cylinders,” where he beams long text passages onto vast surfaces. “I could embed K5 in that,” he says. “It would be in there, waiting.” 他推测，他甚至可能会提供K5密文的预告，将其包含在他的一件公共艺术作品中更长的乱码流里——他一直在做“投影圆柱体”，将长段文本投射到巨大的表面上。“我可以把K5嵌入其中，”他说。“它会待在那里，静候破解。”
So even though Paradigm is the official keeper of the Kryptos secret, Sanborn has not faded away. All the while his stunning creation endures at Langley, mocking the efforts of the mighty intelligence community to seek the truth. 因此，尽管Paradigm是Kryptos秘密的官方保管者，但桑伯恩并没有淡出人们的视野。与此同时，他那令人惊叹的作品依然矗立在兰利，嘲笑着强大的情报界寻求真相的努力。