/* ---- Google Analytics Code Below */

Wednesday, December 09, 2020

Obfuscating the Indistinguishable in Cryptography

 Below is something I had heard mentioned before, but was unclear of the implications.    Here are a number of statements and article give a good overview.   I am exploring for now.  Not saying I can completely state the implications.  Practitioners in the space should start thinking about it, 

A mouthful of terminology is potentially important to cryptography.    And apparently has now been determined to be possible.  This is written up in a recent Quanta article: 

Computer Scientists Achieve ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography

A cryptographic master tool called indistinguishability obfuscation  (iO)   has for years seemed too good to be true. Three researchers have figured out that it can work.  ....

Schneier writes about it here:

   ....  Basically, obfuscation makes a computer program “unintelligible” by performing its functionality. Indistinguishability obfuscation is more relaxed. It just means that two different programs that perform the same functionality can’t be distinguished from each other. A good definition is in this paper.  

(Schneier)     https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/451.pdf    Definition 

https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1003   Foundational paper of the most recent results

No comments: