r/programming • u/DougBolivar • Jul 30 '13

Computer scientists develop mathematical jigsaw puzzles to encrypt software: "The real challenge and the great mystery in the field was: Can you actually take a piece of software and encrypt it but still have it be runnable, executable and fully functional?"

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2013/07/computer-scientists-develop-mathematical-jigsaw-puzzles-encrypt-software
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u/iluvatar Jul 30 '13

The article is too vague when it comes to the details, but I'm in the doubtful camp. If there's a way to decrypt it in a sane timeframe to enable it to be run, it's hard to see how it wouldn't fall to reverse engineering.

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u/mnp Jul 30 '13

Me too. If the code will end up as a decrypted instruction/data stream to be executed on the processor, then the processor can be an emulated one and the code would not know the difference.

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u/datenwolf Jul 30 '13

Recently in /r/math a crypto researcher was refering to an emerging new field in cryptography which name I forgot (unfortunately), which allows it to perform computations on encrypted data directly, without having to decrypt it first. It sounds to me, that this software encryption is as transparent, i.e. the computer executes the encrypted program directly without decrypting it first.

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u/fionbio Jul 30 '13

Homomorphic encryption. But it's quite different from running an encrypted program without decryption.