For what it's worth, because this definitely has confused some people (particularly on Wikipedia): Kryptos is a puzzle sculpture, created by an artist commissioned by the CIA (which so far as I know had no direct input into the sculpture, but paid handsomely for it).

It's not, so far as I know, a "real" cryptosystem. (CIA isn't the center of crypto research for the USG; that's NSA).

Fun. But, rule of thumb, if your method is apropos of nothing and similar methods could produce pretty much any text at all, you have not produced a cryptanalysis.

What, you mean that performing arbitrary permutations and transpositions on a ciphertext until it produces garbage that vaguely resembles actual words in various disjoint places isn't actually cracking the code?!

Who needs the cleartext when you can have "I VOW TO BERLIN FUCk THe POlice ALWAYS"?

Depending on just how silly the method is, any method can count as legitimate cryptanalysis. And, given the huge combinatoric space of natural language, the odds of just hitting upon the correct cryptanalysis are unfathomable.

You can check if your solution is correct at this website whois confirms to be owned by the puzzle creator, Jim Sanborn: http://kryptosclue.com/clue/clue.html

Looks like it could be correct. I've just emailed Jim Sanborn (the creator) to ask if he can confirm or deny it. I'll report back once he gets back to me.

That's beautiful! Just needs a couple more references to Invisible Russians and there's a Sveriges Riksbank prize with speakeasy's name on it.

Not sure if serious.

> From what I see, the solution looks correct. Cool!

On what basis do you reach that conclusion?

Nothing formal --- just the fact that decrypting a message wrongly is very unlikely to produce intelligible text.

Though the decrypting steps seemed quite ad hoc...

Must be a very cryptic one. Way too advanced for us mortal folks.