Speaker: David Walluck
Day:  Wednesday, 12/14/2005
Room: ITEB 201
Time: 4:10pm
Title: Program Obfuscation

Abstract:
Program obfuscation is one of the techniques that have become of much
interest in recent years due to its applicability to content
distribution. If successful, program obfuscation would allow, among
other things, software-based intellectual property protection, such as
protection of secret algorithms and access control. Unfortunately,
program obfuscators that work on arbitrary programs have been shown to
be impossible. However, about a year ago, the first positive results in
program obfuscation were uncovered.

Informally, an obfuscator if an efficient probabilistic program that
transforms a program allowing us to hide the internals of the program
while still giving complete access to functionality. This allows us to
obfuscate the program code and hand the program directly over to the
user. In this talk, we consider several provable obfuscations in the
random oracle model.

Reference:
Benjamin Lynn, Manoj Prabhakaran, Amit Sahai, "Positive Results and
Techniques for Obfuscation", Proceedings of Eurocrypt 2004.