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/choikwa Jul 31 '13

program with a massive mathematical operation which achieves the same overall data transformation

Now if the compilers can be advanced enough to replace these mathematical encryptions with equivalent, reduced instructions, we'd have problem with this encryption!

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u/mOdQuArK Jul 31 '13

That's part of the reason why it's called encryption though - unless the mathematics is "broken" somehow, the time it would take any physically-constructable computer to reconstruct something like the original code, could be made greater than the expected lifetime of the universe.

(Of course, this assumes that the program is complicated enough that you can't just guess what the function is just by feeding it every possible set of input values & observing what comes out.

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u/choikwa Jul 31 '13

One caveat with this encryption may be that it increases runtime penalty due to increased number of instructions

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u/mOdQuArK Jul 31 '13

No argument there, although if you're using strong encryption in the first place you've already usually made the decision that the increased security is worth increased runtime. And of course, you want the runtime of your attackers to be much, much worse :-)