“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.
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"We could have built a social element into Mosaic. But back then the Internet was all about anonymity."
Anderson: Assuming you have enough bandwidth.
Andreessen: That's the very big if in this equation. If you have infinite network bandwidth, if you have an infinitely fast network, then this is what the technology wants. But we're not yet in a world of infinite speed, so that's why we have mobile apps and PC and Mac software on laptops and phones. That's why there are still Xbox games on discs. That's why everything isn't in the cloud. But eventually the technology wants it all to be up there.
Anderson: Back in 1995, Netscape began pursuing this vision by enabling the browser to do more.
Andreessen: We knew that you would need some pro