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AnonTechie writes:

"Indistinguishability obfuscation" is a powerful concept that would yield provably secure versions of every cryptographic system we've ever developed and all those we've been unable to develop. But nobody knows how to put it into practice.

Last week, at the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, MIT researchers showed that the problem of indistinguishability obfuscation is, in fact, a variation on a different cryptographic problem, called efficient functional encryption. And while computer scientists don't know how to do efficient functional encryption, either, they believe that they're close — much closer than they thought they were to indistinguishability obfuscation.

Theorists quickly proved that ideal obfuscation would enable almost any cryptographic scheme that they could dream up. But almost as quickly, they proved that it was impossible: There's always a way to construct a program that can't be perfectly obfuscated.

For years, the idea of indistinguishability obfuscation lay idle. But in the last few years, computer scientists have shown how to construct indistinguishability-obfuscation schemes from mathematical objects called multilinear maps. Remarkably, they also showed that even the weaker notion of indistinguishability obfuscation could yield all of cryptography.

http://scienceblog.com/80939/is-a-new-basis-for-all-cryptography-at-hand/

[Also Covered By]: http://phys.org/news/2015-10-basis-cryptography.html

[Source]: http://news.mit.edu/2015/secure-foundation-any-cryptographic-system-1028

[Paper]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/163.pdf [PDF]

Original Submission