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2020-11-13 b
COMPUTER GENIUS COULD PROTECT US FROM BIG BROTHER'S SURVEILLANCE STATE

Computer Scientists Achieve ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography

A cryptographic master tool called indistinguishability obfuscation has for years seemed too good to be true. Three researchers have figured out that it can work.

n 2018, Aayush Jain, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, traveled to Japan to give a talk about a powerful cryptographic tool he and his colleagues were developing. As he detailed the team’s approach to indistinguishability obfuscation (iO for short), one audience member raised his hand in bewilderment.

“But I thought iO doesn’t exist?” he said.

At the time, such skepticism was widespread. Indistinguishability obfuscation, if it could be built, would be able to hide not just collections of data but the inner workings of a computer program itself, creating a sort of cryptographic master tool from which nearly every other cryptographic protocol could be built. It is “one cryptographic primitive to rule them all,” said Boaz Barak of Harvard University. But to many computer scientists, this very power made iO seem too good to be true.

Computer scientists set forth candidate versions of iO starting in 2013. But the intense excitement these constructions generated gradually fizzled out, as other researchers figured out how to break their security. As the attacks piled up, “you could see a lot of negative vibes,” said Yuval Ishai of the Technion in Haifa, Israel. Researchers wondered, he said, “Who will win: the makers or the breakers?”

“There were the people who were the zealots, and they believed in [iO] and kept working on it,” said Shafi Goldwasser, director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley. But as the years went by, she said, “there was less and less of those people.”

Now, Jain — together with Huijia Lin of the University of Washington and Amit Sahai, Jain’s adviser at UCLA — has planted a flag for the makers. In a paper posted online on August 18, the three researchers show for the first time how to build indistinguishability obfuscation using only “standard” security assumptions.

All cryptographic protocols rest on assumptions — some, such as the famous RSA algorithm, depend on the widely held belief that standard computers will never be able to quickly factor the product of two large prime numbers. A cryptographic protocol is only as secure as its assumptions, and previous attempts at iO were built on untested and ultimately shaky foundations. The new protocol, by contrast, depends on security assumptions that have been widely used and studied in the past.

“Barring a really surprising development, these assumptions will stand,” Ishai said.
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Over the years, computer scientists have shown that you can use iO as the basis for almost every cryptographic protocol you could imagine (except for black box obfuscation). That includes both classic cryptographic tasks like public key encryption (which is used in online transactions) and dazzling newcomers like fully homomorphic encryption, in which a cloud computer can compute on encrypted data without learning anything about it. And it includes cryptographic protocols no one knew how to build, like deniable or functional encryption.

“It really is kind of the crown jewel” of cryptographic protocols, said Rafael Pass of Cornell University. “Once you achieve this, we can get essentially everything.” (read more)

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