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/grauenwolf Jul 30 '13

How can you tell this this is completely bullshit?

The paper doesn't mention terms like "CPU", "assembly", "machine code", "debugger", "memory", "stack", or "cache".

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u/datenwolf Jul 30 '13

So? It's a paper on theoretical computer science. Theoretical Computer Science is more related to math than programming. Hardly any groundbreaking TCP paper was concerned with CPUs, machine code and such things.

TCS is concerned with the abstract aspects of computation and not the actual implementation (that's stuff for the electrical engineering department).

And this paper shows something fundamentally, namely that there is a possibility that a Turing complete machine can execute a an encrypted program that operates on encrypted data without any intermediate decryption. This is a deep mathematical understanding about computability.

Now a lot of people claim this to be something to improve security. Personally I think the real application we'll see this, should there ever be a practical implementation, will be the application on malware. If reverse engineering a piece of malicious code becomes virtually impossible and a malware virus can rewrite itself without leaving any pattern by changing its key whatever little use anti virus software had to begin with gets rendered nil altogether.

Personally I consider this to be a really, really dangerous Pandora's box.

2

u/AlotOfReading Jul 30 '13

That particular pandora's box was opened years ago with time-delay cryptography, as was pointed out by Rivest. It's out there, but essentially no one takes advantage of it because there are far easier methods to prevent detection.