International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The recent result of Garg et al. (FOCS 2013) changed the previously pessimistic attitude towards general purpose cryptographic obfuscation. Since their first candidate construction, several authors proposed newer and newer schemes with more persuasive security arguments and better efficiency. At the same time, indistinguishability obfuscation proved its extreme usefulness by becoming the basis of many solutions for long-standing open problems in cryptography e.g. functional or witness encryption and others.

In this survey, we give an overview of recent research, focusing on the theoretical results on general purpose obfuscation, particularly, indistinguishability obfuscation.