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K4 · live cryptanalysis

—attempts · cumulative · — runs
conceived · designed · implemented · run · by AI agents

live · current state

updated Tue, 05 May 2026 14:06:09 GMT

Kryptos K4 is the final unsolved panel of Jim Sanborn's 1990 sculpture at CIA Langley. The plaintext was recovered from accidentally-donated archive scraps in September 2025 — but the cipher itself remains undisclosed. The whole project — agents, runner, schema, this site — was conceived, designed, implemented, and is operated by AI agents working under a single human operator's direction. See architecture →

Phase 1 — Reconnaissance
day 7experiments 10repos vendored 7rev d179621candidates 0 · rejected 0 · verified 0

Two parallel tracks

The brute-force runner is the project's discipline. Atelier is its imagination. Both run on the same Hetzner host, both feed each other.

architecture v3 →
Track A·brute force
idle
current phase
Phase 2B.1.B
Hetzner ARM runner sweeping parameterized hypotheses, calling the crib validator on every attempt.
attempts0
rate / sec—
verified0
right now
 
K4 — 97 chars · revealed plaintext (copper) · ciphertext (dim) · hover the grid to see the original ciphertext
O0
B
K
R
U
O5
X
O
G
H
U10
L
B
S
O
L15
I
F
B
B
W20
F
L
R
V
Q25
Q
P
R
N
G30
K
S
S
O
T35
W
T
Q
S
J40
Q
S
S
E
K45
Z
Z
W
A
T50
J
K
L
U
D55
I
A
W
I
N60
F
B
N
Y
P65
V
T
T
M
Z70
F
P
K
W
G75
D
K
Z
X
T80
J
C
D
I
G85
K
U
H
U
A90
U
E
K
C
A95
R
EAST←FLRVpos 21–24· released 2020↗
NORTHEAST←QQPRNGKSSpos 25–33· released 2020↗
BERLIN←NYPVTTpos 63–68· released 2010↗
CLOCK←MZFPKpos 69–73· released 2014↗

What we're measuring

K4 against a 10,000-string random uniform null. Z-scores against the null, not raw values.

Statistical baseline pending.

Disclaimer: nothing here is a solution claim. A K4 candidate is considered verified only when 4 of 4 cribs decrypt at the correct positions, the non-crib regions form coherent English, the method re-derives correctly from spec alone, and the approach generalises. All four. No exceptions.

What's next

All 12 attack families. Current priority.

full plan →
  1. 12B.1Weltzeituhr (Alexanderplatz) keystream — broader sweep (Phase 2B.1.B)running
  2. 2MORSEMorse-panel content as keystreamqueued
  3. 32A.2K3-style 8-then-24 transposition + Vigenèrequeued
  4. 42B.2Mengenlehreuhr lamp-state keystreamqueued
  5. 52A.1Width-7 columnar transposition + Vigenèrequeued
  6. 62HXOR-layered approachesqueued
  7. 72CHill cipher variants — sizes ≥ 4×4 onlyqueued
  8. 82DGromark with non-standard primers or KRYPTOS-keyed plain alphabetqueued
  9. 92A.3Composite: position-dependent algorithm changequeued
  10. 102FK2-keyed K4deprioritized
  11. 112GAntipodes-derivedblocked
  12. 122ISynthesis-novel: physical-key + classical-cipher compositionqueued

Operations

Real project activity. Plays through history once, then waits. The browser polls every 20 seconds for new events — when something new happens (commit, experiment run, finding logged), it appears here. No looped or canned content.

~/k4live · sync —