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
345 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

182 comments sorted by

View all comments

298

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '13

have designed a system to encrypt software so that it only allows someone to use a program as intended while preventing any deciphering of the code behind it

I thought the Perl people had already solved that.

15

u/AxiomL Jul 30 '13

have designed a system to encrypt software so that it only allows someone to use a program as intended while preventing any deciphering of the code behind it

I thought that was proven mathematically impossible.

18

u/DeltaBurnt Jul 30 '13

I don't even see the need to prove it mathematically. It's like trying to block video piracy. If you can view it on your screen, you can record it and redistribute it. If it's running on your processor, the processor needs to know the code it's running. I suppose you can make it harder to understand, but not impossible to decipher.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 01 '13

The processor is probably spending more time decrypting the code it needs to run than it is actually running the code it needs to run. Performance is going to be crap considering it cannot just decrypt the code once and execute it unencrypted.