Paper 2010/414

On Strong Simulation and Composable Point Obfuscation

Nir Bitansky and Ran Canetti

Abstract

The Virtual Black Box (VBB) property for program obfuscators provides a strong guarantee: Anything computable by an efficient adversary given the obfuscated program can also be computed by an efficient simulator with only oracle access to the program. However, we know how to achieve this notion only for very restricted classes of programs. This work studies a simple relaxation of VBB: Allow the simulator unbounded computation time, while still allowing only polynomially many queries to the oracle. We then demonstrate the viability of this relaxed notion, which we call Virtual Grey Box (VGB), in the context of fully composable obfuscators for point programs: It is known that, w.r.t. VBB, if such obfuscators exist then there exist multi-bit point obfuscators (aka ``digital lockers'') and subsequently also very strong variants of encryption that are resilient to various attacks, such as key leakage and key-dependent-messages. However, no composable VBB-obfuscators for point programs have been shown. We show fully composable {\em VGB}-obfuscators for point programs under a strong variant of the Decision Diffie Hellman assumption. We show they suffice for the above applications and even for extensions to the public key setting as well as for encryption schemes with resistance to certain related key attacks (RKA).