Famed obfuscator proving thus far to be unhackable

Wednesday, February 5, 2014 - 08:30 in Mathematics & Economics

(Phys.org) —This past summer a team of researchers from MIT and UCLA, with affiliations with IBM and Microsoft published two papers on Cryptology ePrint Archive. The first described a protocol the team had developed that described how software could be scrambled to prevent someone else from seeing its code. The second paper added more information. The protocol describes a method of creating an obfuscator—as it's known in computer science—a means for hiding everything about the workings of a computer program except inputs and outputs. For most of the history of computer science the possibility of creating a real obfuscator was more dream than reality. Now, it appears that after extensive testing (attempting to hack the code), it appears, according to an in-depth article published in Quanta Magazine, that not only is it possible to create such a virtual device, but it has been done—successfully.

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