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Software Obfuscation Achieved

A team led by UCLA computer scientist Amit Sahai has devised a way to encrypt software such that a program can run only as intended and would-be hackers cannot get at the underlying code.

While previous attempts at software obfuscation succeeded only in slowing attempted breaches, Sahai and his fellow researchers have designed a system that makes it "impossible for an adversary to reverse-engineer the software without solving mathematical problems that take hundreds of years to work out on today's computers."

The system relies on a "multilinear jigsaw puzzle."

Says Sahai:

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. 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.

Read ScienceDaily's story.

Start Date: 
Monday, August 19, 2013