8 Polyalphabetic ciphers
The fourth inscription on Kryptos, the sculpture located at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, is the most famous unsolved crypto mystery created in the last four decades. The other three ciphertexts on this artwork have been solved.
Kryptos and at least two other artworks by the sculptor Jim Sanborn involve a kind of encryption called a polyalphabetic cipher, meaning a cipher that switches between different substitution tables. An overview of Kryptos is given in Appendix A.
How a polyalphabetic cipher works
To introduce polyalphabetic ciphers, we start with a miniature sculpture (called a maquette) that Sanborn ...
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