(Im)possibilityofSoftwareObfuscation-BoazBarak.ppt

On The (Im)possibility of Software Obfuscation Boaz Barak * Joint work with Oded Goldreich, Russell Impagliazzo, Steven Rudich, Amit Sahai, Salil Vadhan and Ke Yang. An obfuscator: An algorithm O such that for any program P , O(P) is a program such that: O(P) has the same functionality as P O(P) is infeasible to analyze / “reverse-engineer”. Intuition: an obfuscator should provide a “virtual black-box” in the sense that giving someone O(P) should be equivalent to giving her a black-box that computes P. What Is an Obfuscator? Why Might Obfuscators Exist? Practical Reasons: Understanding code is very difficult Obfuscation used (successfully?) in practice for security purposes Theoretical Reasons: All canonical hard problems are problems of reverse engineering: SAT, HALTING Rice’s Theorem: You can’t look at the code (Turing Machine description) of a function and find out a non-trivial property of it. Applications for Obfuscators Distributing music on-line Removing Random Oracles for specific natural protocols. Converting a private key encryption to a public key encryption Give someone ability to sign/decrypt a restricted subset of the message space. Private (Shared) Key Encryption ? Public Key Encryption Ek m Dk c m Private Key Encryption Scheme: CPA (Chosen Plaintext Attack) Security: Ek A c m Ee m Dd c m Public Key Encryption Scheme: Security: e A c m The Conversion E’e m D’d c m Instead of publishing the key k, publish e=O(Ek) Security of The Converted Scheme Ek A c m A’ c m e=O(Ek) Defining Obfuscators Definition 1 An algorithm O is an obfuscator if for any circuit C: (functionality) O(C) ~ C (i.e., O(C) computes the same function as C) (polynomial slowdown) |O(C)| ? p(|C|) for some polynomial p( ). We say that O is efficient if it runs in polynomial time. Defining Security A Natural Formal Interpretation: For any adversary A there’s a simulator S such that for any circuit C A(O(C)) ?C.I. SC(1|C|) “Anything that can be learned from the obfuscated form, coul