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Kryptos is a sculpture by the American artist Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters, the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.

Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the four encrypted messages (most using a vigenere cipher with key word Kryptos) it bears. Of these four messages, the first three have been solved, while the fourth message remains one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world. Artist Jim Sanborn has hinted that a fifth coded message will reveal itself after the first four are solved. The sculpture continues to be of interest to cryptanalysts, both amateur and professional, attempting to decode the fourth passage. The artist has so far given four clues to this passage.

The sculpture comprises four large copper plates with other elements consisting of water, wood, plants, red and green granite, white quartz, and petrified wood. The most prominent feature of the entire piece is a large vertical S-shaped copper screen resembling a scroll or a piece of paper emerging from a computer printer, half of which consists of encrypted text, that is located in the northwest corner of the New Headquarters Building courtyard, outside of the agency's cafeteria. The characters are all found within the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, along with question marks, and are cut out of the copper plates. The main sculpture contains four separate enigmatic messages, three of which have been deciphered.

In April 2006, Sanborn released information stating that a letter was omitted from this side of Kryptos "for aesthetic reasons, to keep the sculpture visually balanced". However, Sanborn omitted the extra letter from the small Kryptos models that he sold. In October 2025, the Kryptos auction was formally posted by RR Auction as part of the sale titled "Decoding History: Kryptos, Enigma and the Rosetta Stone", running from 16 October to 20 November 2025.

When the KRYPTOS Vigenère tableau is used to encode the word ILLUSION into ciphertext with the keyword PALIMPCEST, the combination of the first L in ILLUSION and the C in PALIMPCEST renders a K in the ciphertext, which is how it appears on the original coding chart and is correctly transcribed onto the sculpture.

When the KRYPTOS Vigenère tableau is used to decode this message, the combination of R in the ciphertext and S in the keyword renders a U in the plaintext.

The catalogue included Sanborn’s Kryptos archive—comprising the K4 solution, a prototype, encryption tables, and related ephemera—alongside a signed first-edition set of Howard Carter’s The Tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen listed in the same catalogue.

Kobek and Byrne mentioned sifting through several other examples of Sanborn's work in the Smithsonian archives before stumbling across the K4 plaintext, as during an interview with Wired News in 2005, Sanborn was asked if it was important to look at his other works, before and after Kryptos, to understand Kryptos.

After producing Kryptos, Sanborn's first cryptographic sculpture, he went on to make several other sculptures with codes, including an "Untitled Kryptos Piece" and Cyrillic Projector, which contain encrypted Russian Cyrillic text that includes an extract from a classified KGB document.

The dust jacket of the US version of Dan Brown's 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code contains two references to Kryptos—one on the back cover (coordinates printed light red on dark red, vertically next to the blurbs) is a reference to the coordinates mentioned in the plaintext of passage 2, except the degree digit is off by one. The coordinates were part of the first clue of the second The Da Vinci Code WebQuests, with the first answer being Kryptos.

"Gillogly Cracks CIA Art", & "The Kryptos Code Unmasked", 1999, The New York Times

Quick Facts

• Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the four encrypted messages (most using a vigenere cipher with key word Kryptos) it bears.
• In October 2025, the Kryptos auction was formally posted by RR Auction as part of the sale titled "Decoding History: Kryptos, Enigma and the Rosetta Stone", running from 16 October to 20 November 2025.
• Artist Jim Sanborn has hinted that a fifth coded message will reveal itself after the first four are solved.
• After producing Kryptos, Sanborn's first cryptographic sculpture, he went on to make several other sculptures with codes, including an "Untitled Kryptos Piece" and Cyrillic Projector, which contain encrypted Russian Cyrillic text that includes an extract from a classified KGB document.
• Of these four messages, the first three have been solved, while the fourth message remains one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Kryptos". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.