Paper 2016/210

Hopes, Fears and Software Obfuscation: A Survey

Boaz Barak

Abstract

I survey some of the recent progress on software obfuscation spurred by the exciting paper of Garg, Gentry, Halevi, Raykova, Sahai and Waters (FOCS 2013). This is a preprint version of a review article~ appearing in the Communications of the ACM. That article was written for a general computing audience, and is also not up to date on the latest research in this fast-moving field since it was mostly written in 2014. Nevertheless, I thought it might still be of interest to cryptographers.