Welcome to the resource topic for 2004/060
Title:
Positive Results and Techniques for Obfuscation
Authors: Benjamin Lynn, Manoj Prabhakaran, Amit Sahai
Abstract:Informally, an obfuscator \Obf is an efficient, probabilistic compiler'' that transforms a program $P$ into a new program $\Obf(P)$ with the same functionality as $P$, but such that $\Obf(P)$ protects any secrets that may be built into and used by $P$. Program obfuscation, if possible, would have numerous important cryptographic applications, including: (1) Intellectual
property’’ protection of secret algorithms and keys in software, (2) Solving
the long-standing open problem of homomorphic public-key encryption, (3)
Controlled delegation of authority and access, (4) Transforming Private-Key
Encryption into Public-Key Encryption, and (5) Access Control Systems.
Unfortunately however, program obfuscators that work on arbitrary programs
cannot exist [Barak et al]. No positive results for program obfuscation
were known prior to this work.
In this paper, we provide the first positive results in program obfuscation.
We focus on the goal of access control, and give several provable
obfuscations for complex access control functionalities, in the random
oracle model. Our results are obtained through non-trivial compositions of
obfuscations; we note that general composition of obfuscations is
impossible, and so developing techniques for composing obfuscations is an
important goal. Our work can also be seen as making initial progress toward
the goal of obfuscating finite automata or regular expressions, an important
general class of machines which are not ruled out by the impossibility
results of Barak et al. We also note that our work provides the first
formal proof techniques for obfuscation, which we expect to be useful in
future work in this area.
ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2004/060
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