Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Founded Assumptions

Abstract

At least since the initial public proposal of public-key cryptography based on computational hardness conjectures, cryptographers have contemplated the possibility of a "one-way compiler" that translates computer programs into "incomprehensible" but equivalent forms. And yet, the search for such a "one-way compiler" remained elusive for decades. We examine a formalization of this concept with the notion of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) . Roughly speaking, iO requires that the compiled versions of any two equivalent programs (with the same size and running time) be indistinguishable from any efficient adversary. Finally, we show how to construct iO in such a way that we can prove the security of our iO scheme based on well-studied computational hardness conjectures in cryptography.