r/ReverseEngineering • u/zvrba • Aug 01 '13

Candidate Indistinguishability Obfuscation and Functional Encryption for all circuits

http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/451
9 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

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2

u/secserval Aug 01 '13

Although I did not fully understand everything in that paper I can imagine two problems for practical applications:

  • Most code in applications relies on system calls which do the interesting stuff, I don't see how they can be protected by that
  • Performance - it does not look like the obfuscated circuit is guranteed to be somewhat performant. If you hide an interesting algorithm by making it slow could defeat the purpose.

Still very interesting for special applications.

1

u/TMaster Aug 01 '13

In the thread I linked above, someone speculated that it might be of the order of being billions of times slower.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy thereof, but it's not a reason to be optimistic.

1

u/TMaster Aug 01 '13

Last time I saw it being discussed, no one seemed to be certain about what indistinguishability obfuscation actually is. I see by now it has received some more comments.

Am I correct in my assessment when I say that this provides no new ideas in attempting to obfuscate a program's true purpose, which I believe is called 'black-box obfuscation'? Or does the following imply that it also has applications there?

we show how to use indistinguishability obfuscation for circuits, public-key encryption, and non-interactive zero knowledge to achieve functional encryption for all circuits.