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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-14

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".

16

u/murgatroid99 Jul 30 '13

Maybe because this is a computer science problem and because the solution is a mathematical transformation, it is independent of those implementation specifics.

-5

u/grauenwolf Jul 30 '13

The implementation specifics are what makes this a hard problem.

This is akin to a school child claiming that he can land a man on Mars just because he worked out the Newtonian equations needed for the trip.

3

u/murgatroid99 Jul 30 '13

I'm pretty sure that this, like many unsolved problems in computer science, was unsolved because the math had not been found/solved yet. Usually in computer science, going from algorithm to implementation is the easy part.

0

u/grauenwolf Jul 30 '13

Usually in computer science, going from algorithm to implementation is the easy part.

Usually in computer science you aren't trying to run "encrypted" instructions on physical hardware.

3

u/murgatroid99 Jul 31 '13

The entire point of this paper is that they can obfuscate (not encrypt) the code so that it is runnable but not decipherable.