International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 30 April 2014

Mark Zhandry
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Recently, program obfuscation has proven to be an extremely powerful tool and has been used to construct a variety of cryptographic primitives with amazing properties. However, current candidate obfuscators are far from practical and rely on unnatural hardness assumptions about multilinear maps. In this work, we bring several applications of obfuscation closer to practice by showing that a weaker primitive called witness pseudorandom functions (witness PRFs) suces. Applications include multiparty key exchange without trusted setup, polynomially-many hardcore bits for any one-way function, and more. We then show how to instantiate witness PRFs from multilinear maps. Our witness PRFs are simpler and more ecient than current obfuscation candidates, and involve very natural hardness assumptions about the underlying maps.

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