## Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2013/665

A Note on the Impossibility of Obfuscation with Auxiliary Input

Shafi Goldwasser and Yael Tauman Kalai

Abstract: In this note we revisit the problem of obfuscation with auxiliary inputs. We show that the existence of indistinguishablity obfuscation (iO) implies that all functions with sufficient "pseudo-entropy" cannot be obfuscated with respect to a virtual box definition (VBB) in the presence of (dependent) auxiliary input. Namely, we show that for any candidate obfuscation O and for any function family F={f_s} with sufficient pseudo-entropy, there exists an (efficiently computable) auxiliary input aux, that demonstrates the insecurity of O. This is true in a strong sense: given O(f_s) and aux one can efficiently recover the seed s, whereas given aux and oracle access to f_s it is computationally hard to recover s.

A similar observation was pointed out in a recent work of Goldwasser et. al. (Crypto 2013), assuming *extractable* witness encryption. In this note we show that the extractability property of the witness encryption is not needed to get our negative result, and all that is needed is the existence of witness encryption, which in turn can be constructed from iO obfuscation.

Category / Keywords: foundations / obfuscation, auxiliary inputs

Date: received 17 Oct 2013, last revised 17 Oct 2013

Contact author: yaelism at gmail com

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Short URL: ia.cr/2013/665

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