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Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2020/1003 - Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Founded Assumptions
by Bob Hettinga 12 Nov '20

12 Nov '20

https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1003

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Cryptocurrency: Central Bank DC's, War on Cash, No Privacy For You
by grarpamp 12 Nov '20

12 Nov '20

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/armstrongeconomics101/economics/cashless… https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/martin-armstrong-warns-cashless-worl… ps: YouTube just deployed a big censorship ugrade to its global datacenters today, triggered all sorts of downtime. Keep ignoring all the warnings you stupid fucks ! "Make no mistake about it. They have all conspired to get rid of Trump because he stands in the way of not just climate change, but the total usurpation of the world...." " Martin Armstrong Warns Cashless World Signals Global End To Privacy Profile picture for user Tyler Durden by Tyler Durden Wed, 11/11/2020 - 17:02 Authored by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com, Countries are moving to digital currencies at lightning speed. This is the future of money. Digital currencies will replace cash on an ASAP agenda. We are witnessing Europe, Canada, Asia, and even China all moving toward this new digital world for (1) total control, (2) taxes, (3) to track everyone and every transaction. We have been witnessing world leaders, including Trudeau, eager to see the fall of Trump because he has stood in opposition to this movement. Even China has begun trials of a new digital Yuan. They have already outlawed BitCoin. You are witnessing the same unfolding in Europe. In the USA, legally you are supposed to report what digital currency you have when traveling from overseas because you are carrying more than $10,000 even if you had that when you left. Bitcoin, I have warned, was allowed to operate because the government wanted people to get accustomed to digital currency. Once they broke ground, then it was just a stroke of the pen to outlaw it and convert everything to the digital sovereign currency. The digital currency will become an international currency. Many countries are hoping this will dethrone the dollar. The Chinese are looking at this as a way to also bypass the SWIFT system that the West has used to impose sanctions on countries. In that respect, they have brought that on themselves. However, this new world of a digital economy brings with it great damage to our freedom. This is why Bill Gates has been pushing this at the United Nations, which he seems to have bought. Gates is looking for a monopoly far beyond Microsoft. He wants a monopoly over the digital world. I think his dreams are bigger than his ego. Digital money is a way to know everything any citizen does and it will allow every government to track its citizens. In the United States, the IRS has already been using digital info to track people illegally. This is just the beginning. At the G20 meetings back in 2017, there were discussions behind the curtain about eliminating currency. Governments were beginning their secret agenda adapting to a new banking system by September 2017 that would provide instant transfers in order to support an electronic currency. You can go to a store, pay for something, but the money does not show up for three days. That had to change in order to make the digital currency viable. Bill Gates even sent his wife to pitch digital currencies to the G20. Melinda Gates has addressed the G20 on the claim that this will empower women. She told the G20 that eliminating paper money and moving to 100% digital currencies will somehow strangely empower women who otherwise are suppressed by paper money. I can’t even understand that logic. But she has also been spearheading that women are oppressed because they have children. So she is on to the entire theory of depopulation for climate change. Make no mistake about it. They have all conspired to get rid of Trump because he stands in the way of not just climate change, but the total usurpation of the world. "

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Crypto: Zoom and Apple T2... Trusted Crypto That Isn't
by grarpamp 12 Nov '20

12 Nov '20

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-t2-chip-unfixable-flaw-jailbreak-mac/ https://github.com/windknown/presentations/blob/master/Attack_Secure_Boot_o… https://duckduckgo.com/?q="checkra1n" Apple's T2 Security Chip Has an Unfixable Flaw The Checkm8 vulnerability that exposed years of iPhones to jailbreaking has finally been exploited in Macs as well, called Checkra1n. "This chip, which was supposed to provide all this extra security, is now pretty much moot." https://www.zdnet.com/article/zoom-to-roll-out-end-to-end-encrypted-e2ee-ca… Not logically possible that Zoom claimed to have secure p2p, but now adds secure p2p, thus lied again. Of course it is all closed source and account based, making it trivial for Zoom / Rogue Staff, Govts, etc to exploit users at will. Video conferencing platform Zoom announced today plans to roll out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) capabilities starting next week. From a report: E2EE will allow Zoom users to generate individual encryption keys that will be used to encrypt voice or video calls between them and other conference participants. These keys will be stored locally and will not be shared with Zoom servers, meaning the software company won't be able to access or intercept any ongoing E2EE meetings. Support for E2EE calls will first be part of Zoom clients to be released next week. To use the new feature, users must update theri clients next week and enable support for E2EE calls at the account level. This green shield will contain a lock if E2EE is active. If the lock is absent, Zoom will use its default AES 256-bit GCM encryption scheme, which the company uses to secure current communications, but which the company can also intercept.

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Tech Xplore: Alphabet harnesses light beams to bring Internet to Africa
by jim bell 12 Nov '20

12 Nov '20

Tech Xplore: Alphabet harnesses light beams to bring Internet to Africa. https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-alphabet-harnesses-internet-africa.html

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The Washington Post: Swiss report reveals new details on CIA spying operation
by jim bell 12 Nov '20

12 Nov '20

The Washington Post: Swiss report reveals new details on CIA spying operation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/swiss-report-reveals-new-d…

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Journalist not a c-punks arsehole
by professor rat 12 Nov '20

12 Nov '20

JULIAN Assange supports suspected war-criminals and Five-Eyes military secrecy. Assange: I can rule from abroad | | | | | | | | | | | Assange: I can rule from abroad The WikiLeaks party officially launched its senate bid in Melbourne yesterday. Its leader, Julian Assange, says ... | | |

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James A. donald is a Lying Apologist for Mass Murder.
by professor rat 12 Nov '20

12 Nov '20

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Rat Scientists look to unify quantum-gravity, cosmology and cryptography
by professor rat 11 Nov '20

11 Nov '20

Direct Cryptographic Computation of the Cosmological Constant $Ω_Λ$ | | | | Direct Cryptographic Computation of the Cosmological Constant $Ω_Λ$ A direct cryptographic computation of the Cosmological Constant ΩΛ based solely on a physically anchored prime m... | | |

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Computer Scientists Achieve ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography - indistinguishability obfuscation
by coderman 11 Nov '20

11 Nov '20

https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-achieve-crown-jewel-of-c… In 2018, [Aayush Jain](https://sites.google.com/view/aayushjain/home), 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](https://www.boazbarak.org/) 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](http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~yuvali/) 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](https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~rachel/) of the University of Washington and [Amit Sahai](http://web.cs.ucla.edu/~sahai/), Jain’s adviser at UCLA — has planted a flag for the makers. In a [paper](https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1003) posted online on August 18, the three researchers show for the first time how to build indistinguishability obfuscation using only “standard” security assumptions. Aayush Jain, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, in Oakland this month. Eleena Mohanty 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. While the protocol is far from ready to be deployed in real-world applications, from a theoretical standpoint it provides an instant way to build an array of cryptographic tools that were previously out of reach. For instance, it enables the creation of “deniable” encryption, in which you can plausibly convince an attacker that you sent an entirely different message from the one you really sent, and “functional” encryption, in which you can give chosen users different levels of access to perform computations using your data. The new result should definitively silence the iO skeptics, Ishai said. “Now there will no longer be any doubts about the existence of indistinguishability obfuscation,” he said. “It seems like a happy end.” The Crown Jewel For decades, computer scientists wondered if there is any secure, all-encompassing way to obfuscate computer programs, allowing people to use them without figuring out their internal secrets. Program obfuscation would enable a host of useful applications: For instance, you could use an obfuscated program to delegate particular tasks within your bank or email accounts to other individuals, without worrying that someone could use the program in a way it wasn’t intended for or read off your account passwords (unless the program was designed to output them). But so far, all attempts to build practical obfuscators have failed. “The ones that have come out in real life are ludicrously broken, … typically within hours of release into the wild,” Sahai said. At best, they offer attackers a speed bump, he said. In 2001, bad news came on the theoretical front too: The strongest form of obfuscation is impossible. Called black box obfuscation, it demands that attackers should be able to learn absolutely nothing about the program except what they can observe by using the program and seeing what it outputs. Some programs, Barak, Sahai and five other researchers [showed](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-44647-8_1), reveal their secrets so determinedly that they are impossible to obfuscate fully. These programs, however, were specially concocted to defy obfuscation and bear little resemblance to real-world programs. So computer scientists hoped there might be some other kind of obfuscation that was weak enough to be feasible but strong enough to hide the kinds of secrets people actually care about. The same researchers who showed that black box obfuscation is impossible proposed one possible alternative in their paper: indistinguishability obfuscation. On the face of it, iO doesn’t seem like an especially useful concept. Instead of requiring that a program’s secrets be hidden, it simply requires that the program be obfuscated enough that if you have two different programs that perform the same task, you can’t distinguish which obfuscated version came from which original version. Amit Sahai of UCLA. UCLA But iO is stronger than it sounds. For example, suppose you have a program that carries out some task related to your bank account, but the program contains your unencrypted password, making you vulnerable to anyone who gets hold of the program. Then — as long as there is some program out there that could perform the same task while keeping your password hidden — an indistinguishability obfuscator will be strong enough to successfully mask the password. After all, if it didn’t, then if you put both programs through the obfuscator, you’d be able to tell which obfuscated version came from your original program. 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](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~rafael/) of Cornell University. “Once you achieve this, we can get essentially everything.” In 2013, Sahai and five co-authors [proposed an iO protocol](https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/451) that splits up a program into something like jigsaw puzzle pieces, then uses cryptographic objects called multilinear maps to garble the individual pieces. If the pieces are put together correctly, the garbling cancels out and the program functions as intended, but each individual piece looks meaningless. The result was hailed as a breakthrough and prompted dozens of follow-up papers. But within a few years, other researchers showed that the [multilinear maps used](https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/610) in the garbling process were not secure. Other iO candidates came along and were broken in their turn. “There was some worry that maybe this is just a mirage, maybe iO is simply impossible to get,” Barak said. People started to feel, he said, that “maybe this whole enterprise is doomed.” Hiding Less to Hide More In 2016, Lin started exploring whether it might be possible to get around the weaknesses of multilinear maps by simply demanding less of them. Multilinear maps are essentially just secretive ways of computing with polynomials — mathematical expressions made up of sums and products of numbers and variables, like 3xy + 2yz2. These maps, Jain said, entail something akin to a polynomial calculating machine connected to a system of secret lockers containing the values of the variables. A user who drops in a polynomial that the machine accepts gets to look inside one final locker to find out whether the hidden values make the polynomial evaluate to 0. For the scheme to be secure, the user shouldn’t be able to figure out anything about the contents of the other lockers or the numbers that were generated along the way. “We would like that to be true,” Sahai said. But in all the candidate multilinear maps people could come up with, the process of opening the final locker revealed information about the calculation that was supposed to stay hidden. Huijia Lin of the University of Washington. Dennis Wise/University of Washington Since the proposed multilinear map machines all had security weaknesses, Lin wondered if there was a way to build iO using machines that don’t have to compute as many different kinds of polynomials (and therefore might be easier to build securely). Four years ago, she [figured out](https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/257) how to build iO using only multilinear maps that compute polynomials whose “degree” is 30 or less (meaning that every term is a product of at most 30 variables, counting repeats). Over the next couple of years, she, Sahai and other researchers gradually figured out how to bring the degree down even lower, until they were able to show how to build iO using just degree-3 multilinear maps. On paper, it looked like a vast improvement. There was just one problem: From a security standpoint, “degree 3 was actually as broken” as the machines that can handle polynomials of every degree, Jain said. The only multilinear maps researchers knew how to build securely were those that computed polynomials of degree 2 or less. Lin joined forces with Jain and Sahai to try to figure out how to construct iO from degree-2 multilinear maps. But “we were stuck for a very, very long time,” Lin said. “It was kind of a gloomy time,” Sahai recalled. “There’s a graveyard filled with all the ideas that didn’t work.” Eventually, though — together with [Prabhanjan Ananth](https://www.cs.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/ananth) of the University of California, Santa Barbara and [Christian Matt](https://cmatt.info/) of the blockchain project Concordium — they came up with an idea for a sort of compromise: Since iO seemed to need degree-3 maps, but computer scientists only had secure constructions for degree-2 maps, what if there was something in between — a sort of degree-2.5 map? The researchers envisioned a system in which some of the lockers have clear windows, so the user can see the values contained within. This frees the machine from having to protect too much hidden information. To strike a balance between the power of higher-degree multilinear maps and the security of degree-2 maps, the machine is allowed to compute with polynomials of degree higher than 2, but there’s a restriction: The polynomial must be degree 2 on the hidden variables. “We’re trying to not hide as much” as in general multilinear maps, Lin said. The researchers were able to show that these hybrid locker systems can be constructed securely. Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine But to get from these less powerful multilinear maps to iO, the team needed one last ingredient: a new kind of pseudo-randomness generator, something that expands a string of random bits into a longer string that still looks random enough to fool computers. That’s what Jain, Lin and Sahai have figured out how to do in their new paper. “There was a wonderful last month or so where everything came together in a flurry of phone calls,” Sahai said. The result is an iO protocol that finally avoids the security weaknesses of multilinear maps. “Their work looks absolutely beautiful,” Pass said. The scheme’s security rests on four mathematical assumptions that have been widely used in other cryptographic contexts. And even the assumption that has been studied the least, called the “learning parity with noise” assumption, is related to a problem that has been studied since the 1950s. There is likely only one thing that could break the new scheme: a [quantum computer](https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/quantum-computing), if a full-power one is ever built. One of the four assumptions is vulnerable to quantum attacks, but over the past few months a separate line of work has emerged in [three](https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1010) [separate](https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1024) [papers](https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1042) by Pass and other researchers offering a different potential route to iO that might be secure even from quantum attacks. These versions of iO rest on less established security assumptions than the ones Jain, Lin and Sahai used, several researchers said. But it is possible, Barak said, that the two approaches could be combined in the coming years to create a version of iO that rests on standard security assumptions and also resists quantum attacks. Jain, Lin and Sahai’s construction will likely entice new researchers into the field to work on making the scheme more practical and to develop new approaches, Ishai predicted. “Once you know that something is possible in principle, it makes it psychologically much easier to work in the area,” he said. Computer scientists still have much work to do before the protocol (or some variation on it) can be used in real-world applications. But that is par for the course, researchers said. “There’s a lot of notions in cryptography that, when they first came out, people were saying, ‘This is just pure theory, [it] has no relevance to practice,’” Pass said. “Then 10 or 20 years later, Google is implementing these things.” The road from a theoretical breakthrough to a practical protocol can be a long one, Barak said. “But you could imagine,” he said, “that maybe 50 years from now the crypto textbooks will basically say, ‘OK, here is a very simple construction of iO, and from that we’ll now derive all of the rest of crypto.’”

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Cecilia Tanaka Nazi lover.
by professor rat 11 Nov '20

11 Nov '20

YOU do know there are at least two Nazi's posting a shitload of NAZI crap here don't you, deer? Gramps and Zenaan. JFC. Then don't get me started on that little fucking NAZBOL cockroach, James A. Donald. Jesus Fucking Christ ...

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