Cryptographic Program Obfuscation: Current Capabilities and Challenges

Cryptographic program obfuscation (CPO) enables the evaluation of obfuscated programs/circuits for non-encrypted inputs using cryptographic approaches based on standard (or almost standard) security assumptions. CPO is a hot topic of cryptography that has recently seen remarkable progress, fueled by the DARPA SafeWare program. CPO has a lot of potential high-impact applications for the defense industry, specifically in classification problems and other areas of machine learning. Many recent advances in CPO have come from the cryptographic primitives based on lattices. This talk reviews some of these advances and current capabilities/applications of lattice-based CPO protocols from the perspective of PALISADE, an open-source lattice cryptography library that is being developed by the NJIT Cybersecurity Research Center in collaboration with its partners in academia, government, and industry. The current challenges limiting the practicability of CPO are also discussed. See more at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/cryptographic-program-obfuscation-current-capabilities-challenges/