[This is extremely intriguing. -egg]

As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996, Amit Sahai was fascinated by the strange notion of a “zero-knowledge” proof, a type of mathematical protocol for convincing someone that something is true without revealing any details of why it is true. As Sahai mulled over this counterintuitive concept, it led him to consider an even more daring notion: What if it were possible to mask the inner workings not just of a proof, but of a computer program, so that people could use the program without being able to figure out how it worked?

[…]

As Sahai pondered program obfuscation, however, he and several colleagues quickly realized that its potential far surpassed any specific applications. If a program obfuscator could be created, it could solve many of the problems that have driven cryptography for the past 40 years — problems about how to conduct secure interactions with people at, say, the other end of an Internet connection, whom you may not know or trust.

[…]

Then, on July 20, 2013, Sahai and five co-authors posted a paper on the Cryptology ePrint Archive demonstrating a candidate protocol for a kind of obfuscation known as “indistinguishability obfuscation.” Two days later, Sahai and one of his co-authors, Brent Waters, of the University of Texas, Austin, posted a second paper that suggested, together with the first paper, that this somewhat arcane form of obfuscation may possess much of the power cryptographers have dreamed of.

via Cryptography Breakthrough Could Make Software Unhackable – Wired Science.