Paper 2014/779 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2014/779 ↗

Implementing Cryptographic Program Obfuscation

Abstract

Program obfuscation is the process of making a program "unintelligible" without changing the program's underlying input/output behavior. Although there is a long line of work on heuristic techniques for obfuscation, such approaches do not provide any cryptographic guarantee on their effectiveness. A recent result by Garg et al. (FOCS 2013), however, shows that cryptographic program obfuscation is indeed possible based on a new primitive called a \emph{graded encoding scheme}. In this work, we present the first implementation of such an obfuscator. We describe several challenges and optimizations we made along the way, present a detailed evaluation of our implementation, and discuss research problems that need to be addressed before such obfuscators can be used in practice.