----- Forwarded message from Noon Silk <noonslists@gmail.com> ----- Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 21:18:45 +1000 From: Noon Silk <noonslists@gmail.com> To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork@xent.com> Subject: [FoRK] Functional encryption, or "Computer scientists develop 'mathematical jigsaw puzzles' to encrypt software" Reply-To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork@xent.com> http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-computer-scientists-develop-247527... Looks interesting. -- UCLA computer science professor Amit Sahai and a team of researchers have designed a system to encrypt software so that it only allows someone to use a program as intended while preventing any deciphering of the code behind it. This is known in computer science as "software obfuscation," and it is the first time it has been accomplished. [...] "You can inspect everything, you can turn it upside-down, you can look at it from different angles and you still won't have any idea what it's doing," he added. "The only thing you can do with it is put it together the way that it was meant to interlock. If you tried to do anything else — like if you tried to bash this piece and put it in some other way — you'd just end up with garbage." *Functional encryption* The new technique for software obfuscation paved the way for another breakthrough called functional encryption. With functional encryption, instead of sending an encrypted message, an encrypted function is sent in its place. This offers a much more secure way to protect information, Sahai said. Previous work on functional encryption was limited to supporting very few functions; the new work can handle any computable function. For example, a single message could be sent to a group of people in such a way that each receiver would obtain different information, depending on characteristics of that particular receiver. In another example, a hospital could share the outcomes of treatment with researchers without revealing details such as identifying patient information. "Through functional encryption, you only get the specific answer, you don't learn anything else," Sahai said. -- -- Noon Silk Fancy a quantum lunch? https://sites.google.com/site/quantumlunch/ "Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy — the joy of being this signature." _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5