There is no Indistinguishability Obfuscation in Pessiland

Tal Moran; Alon Rosen

Paper 2013/643

There is no Indistinguishability Obfuscation in Pessiland

Tal Moran and Alon Rosen

Abstract

We show that if $\NP \neq co-RP$ then the existence of efficient indistinguishability obfuscation (\iO) implies the existence of one-way functions. Thus, if we live in ``Pessiland", where $\NP$ problems are hard on the average but one-way functions do not exist, or even in ``Heuristica", where $\NP$ problems are hard in the worst case but easy on average, then \iO is impossible. Our result makes it redundant to explicitly assume the existence of one-way functions in most ``cryptographically interesting" applications of \iO.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Foundations
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: obfuscation one-way functions
Contact author(s): alon rosen @ idc ac il
History: 2013-10-10: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2013/643
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2013/643,
      author = {Tal Moran and Alon Rosen},
      title = {There is no Indistinguishability Obfuscation in Pessiland},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2013/643},
      year = {2013},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/643}
}