The Scottish Boinc Team

Kryptos@Home

https://www.kryptosathome.com/

Project Overview

Kryptos@Home is a volunteer computing project which allows anyone on the internet to contribute computing resources to research projects, related to solving one of the most famous, unsolved puzzles - the three-decade old Kryptos!

More precisely, it is a sculpture located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia - at the main entrance to New Headquarters Building (NHB) and in the courtyard between NHB and the Original Headquarters Building (OHB) cafeteria - completed by the American artist James Sanborn, on November 3, 1990.

The Kryptos sculpture comprises four large copper plates, a large vertical S-shaped copper screen resembling a scroll of four encrypted messages, three of which (referred to as K1, K2 and K3) have been solved.

As a community, Kryptos@Home's mission is to crack the elusive K4.
Research & Applications

We maintain an up-to-date list of currently available applications, and research directions, on the dedicated section of our web site.
Kryptos Puzzle
Other interesting facts

The name Kryptos comes from the ancient Greek word for "hidden", and the theme of the sculpture is "Intelligence Gathering".
The design and installation cost of the sculpture was $250,000 (in 1988 US dollars; the 2020 equivalent is $556,702.77).
The sculpture was a commissioned work of art, as a dedication to the NHB, which was completed in March 1991.
Mr. Sanborn chose polished red granite, quartz, copperplate, lodestone, and petrified wood.
Mr. Sanborn worked for four months with Ed Scheidt - retired Chairman of the CIA Office of Communications - to devise the codes used in the sculpture.
In addition to the S-shaped screen, the actual Kryptos installation consists also of a Morse-code message and a compass rose. There is also an adjacent fountain. Some suspect that there might be hidden clues in them. However, the solutions to K1, K2 and K3 didn't require any physical access to the installation, which is off-limits to the public, due to it being located on CIA grounds. Furthermore, there are no Kryptos tours available to the public. When asked by Wired News whether one has to be on the CIA grounds in order to solve Kryptos, Mr. Sanborn laconically responded with a "No".

Resources

For a list of useful Kryptos resources - from around the magical, electric interwebs - please, refer to the dedicated dedicated section of our web site.

Team has been setup for you guys. https://www.kryptosathome.com/team_disp ... ?teamid=36

Kryptos Plato: Searching for Hill cipher solutions
Platform
Microsoft Windows running on an AMD x86_64 or Intel EM64T CPU 0.05 (vbox64_mt)
Linux running on an AMD x86_64 or Intel EM64T CPU 0.05 (vbox64_mt)
Intel 64-bit Mac OS 10.5 or later 0.05 (vbox64_mt)

Application Details
Overview

The Kryptos puzzle is unique in that it has resisted the test of time and has remained unsolved for more than thirty years! Furthermore, the creator has provided only one "copy" of each of the four parts that comprise the puzzle.

This naturally suggests that completely new and out-of-the box methods and approaches need to be devised and tested. Consequently, the calibration of any such method becomes a challenge, due to small sample size, by which any individual puzzle is characterized.

We may occasionally use solved or unsolved puzzles, other than Kryptos, for the purpose of validation and/or calibration of some of our algorithms.

For the purpose of full disclosure and transparency, the full list of such puzzles will be maintained on the current page.

Currently, we don't use any puzzles, besides Kryptos, for validation and/or calibration of our algorithms.
Kryptos Plato

Our Kryptos Plato application is our first BOINC application, that has been deployed to and employed in our production environment.

We use genetic algorithms to search for Hill cipher solutions to K4.

Technically speaking, we are looking for invertible matrices which - when employed as Hill cipher keys - result in matches to the cryptographic cribs (which have been provided to the Kryptos community, in the form of K4 clues, by James Sanborn himself), and also provide some meaningful decryptions of the remainder of K4.

First units in and running under Win 10. Seems fine, 4 credit for a 6 min unit.

I've had problems running this under win 10 with vbox 6.1.xx
Basically any time BOINC interrupts the task or cpu usage interrupts the task it will enter a state of hypervisor unmanageable. A restart will see any units in this state run to completion but they seem to invariably fail validation.

It appears the solution is to roll back vbox to 5.2.xx . I'm using 5.2.44, the last stable release with the associated extension pack. So far that seems to have stopped the issue.
I've also put the following app_config.xml in the project folder. Starting off running 1 unit at a time and will see how it progresses.
The project intends to release a native app for win as this is obviously an issue as a lot of people will have upgraded to vbox 6

Alternatively, if you have vbox, you can also install a flavour of Linux under that, plus boinc etc and run the project natively. I have that on my laptop to allow me to run Linux only projects if required.

I've been running it for 1 1/2 days (@340k) and I've had a 3.7% failure rate. I running with HT OFF and using all available cores. I'm not seeing that much difference between VBox 6.1.10 and 5.2.X. I have 1 Win and 1 Linux machine running VBox 6 and then 5 Linux machines running version 5.2.X. The WU failure rate is between 2.8 and 4% regardless of VBox version.

Machines - 32-36 cores with 4G RAM/ core.

@Bryan It runs fine under vbox 6.1.xx as long as you just leave it alone. The problem is if you or BOINC manager suspend the task then it will not validate after restart. Wouldn't be an issue on my crunching boxes, but on the laptop I have away with me it is, as obviously BOINC has to give way when I'm using it for the purpose it was supplied to me to use ie work
Unfortunately, I can't just bin 'work' tempting as that is, hence the roll back of vbox. From the project forum it appears that the issue is that the vbox app uses boot2docker which is fully supported under vbox 5.2.xx but is not supported with vbox 6.xx