Cryptographers advance obfuscation, the "final boss" primitive that hides program code while preserving functionality; combined with blockchains, enables trustless voting and protocols without committees—after decades of failed attempts, recent years bring breakthrough progress on provably secure indistinguishability obfuscation.

Obfuscation: building the final boss of cryptography (Part I)

2026 Jun 29 See all posts Obfuscation: building the final boss of cryptography (Part I) Special thanks to Sora Suegami, Janmajaya Mall, Aayush Jain and Fun Killer for feedback and review. The most powerful primitive that has been conceived in cryptography is obfuscation. Obfuscation lets you convert a program \(P\) into an "encrypted program" \(Obf(P)\) such that you can run \(Obf(P)\) on cleartext inputs and get the same cleartext outputs that \(P\) gives you, but the internal workings of \(P\)...