Expedition to Obfustopia: Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Studied Assumptions to New Frontiers

At least since the initial public proposal of public-key cryptography based on computational hardness assumptions (Diffie and Hellman, 1976), cryptographers have contemplated the possibility of a “one-way compiler” that translates computer programs into “unintelligible” ones that compute the same function. This vision has been formalized in the notion of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), which over the past decade has emerged as a powerful and versatile tool for enabling a wide range of goals both within and beyond cryptography. In this talk, we will outline milestones in the conceptual and technical development of iO, and the tortuous decade-long journey toward its realization. We will convey the high-level ideas behind the recent constructions based on three well-studied hardness assumptions, as well as explore the emerging frontier: latest efforts to realize iO from simple-to-state assumptions over integer lattices. These advances form a robust foundation for obfuscation and raise intriguing open questions for future work. Together, they chart our ongoing expedition toward Obfustopia - a long-envisioned land where general-purpose obfuscation becomes both theoretically sound and practically attainable.