Program Obfuscation: A cryptographic Viewpoint

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 become the focus of more rigorous and comprehensive study. On the one hand, the study points to new and exciting applications of program obfuscation, such as secure cloud computing, trustworthy implementation of economic mechanisms, and privacy preserving public databases. On the other hand, some strong impossiblity results come about. Above all, however, program obfuscation emerges as an intriguing and mostly uncharted research territory.
The talk will review some of the main results for program obfuscation and discuss potential research directions.