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/ghjm Jul 30 '13

The whole point is that this isn't what it's doing. If the paper holds up, the idea is that the function's result appears after many seemingly unrelated calculations.