Title: Program Obfuscation:  A Brave New World

Abstract:
Program obfuscation is the art of writing programs in a way that renders the code unintelligible even to parties that can run it. Long the exclusive domain of heuristics and “programming tricks,” program obfuscation has recently taken the cryptographic community by storm. Indeed, the concept was shown to give a completely new way of obtaining familiar cryptographic primitives, as well as new ones that used to be mere fantasy. It also has implications well beyond cryptography. Yet, the plausibility of its existence is still far from being well understood: Current candidate constructions can only be proven secure under strong, specific, and non-standard hardness assumptions. 

The talk will review some of the main notions, implications, and constructions of program obfuscation. No prior knowledge of cryptography will be assumed.

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