“A program obfuscator would be a powerful tool for finding plausible constructions for just about any cryptographic task you could conceive of,” said Yuval Ishai, of the Technion in Haifa, Israel.
Precisely because of obfuscation’s power, many computer scientists, including Sahai and his colleagues, thought it was impossible. “We were convinced it was too powerful to exist,” he said. Their earliest research findings seemed to confirm this, showing that the most natural form of obfuscation is indeed impossible to achieve for all programs.
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.
“This is the first serious positive result” when it comes to trying to find a universal obfuscator, said Boaz Barak, of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Mass. “The cryptography community is very excited.” In the six months since the original paper was posted, more papers have appeared on the ePrint archive with “obfuscation” in the title than in the previous 17 years.
Axel Vogelsang on 28 Jan 13Liebieghaus, Städel und Schirn bieten in Zusammenarbeit mit kunstsprünge mit dem Projekt KOMM! bereits im dritten Jahr eine Form der Kunstvermittlung an, die sich gezielt an Jugendliche wendet, die ihren Weg in Beruf und Gesellschaft noch nicht finden konnten. Ziel des Projekts ist es, die Jugendlichen in ihrer beruflichen und privaten Orientierung zu unterstützen, ihre Identität zu stärken und ihnen über die Beschäftigung mit bildender Kunst Teamwork, Kreativität, die Fähigkeit zur Kommunikation und Argumentation wie auch Selbstreflexion und -vertrauen zu vermitteln.
