In 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.

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, 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.

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 of Cornell University. “Once you achieve this, we can get essentially everything.”

In 2013, Sahai and five co-authors proposed an iO protocol 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 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.

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 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 of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Christian Matt 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.