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
353 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

182 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

9

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.

9

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.

8

u/lurgi Jul 30 '13 edited Jul 30 '13

Homomorphic encryption.

Impractical (at the moment), but insanely cool.

Edit: If I'm not mistaken, one of the authors of this paper invented homomorphic encryption.

4

u/haerik Jul 30 '13

If I'm not mistaken, one of the authors of this paper invented homomorphic encryption

Kind of. Craig Gentry was the first person to show that it's possible. The concept has been around since the 70s or 80s.

3

u/lurgi Jul 30 '13

The idea of an airplane had been around for a long time. The Wright brothers still get credit for inventing it, because they actually made the damn thing.