How to Avoid Obfuscation using Witness PRFs

Speaker: Mark Zhandry

Date: Friday, April 25, 2014

Time: 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM Note: all times are in the Eastern Time Zone

Public: Yes

Location: 32-G449

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Host: Vinod Vaikuntanathan, TOC, CSAIL, MIT

Contact: Holly A Jones, hjones01@csail.mit.edu

Relevant URL: http://toc.csail.mit.edu/node/562

Speaker URL: None

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Reminders to: seminars@csail.mit.edu, cis-seminars@csail.mit.edu

Reminder Subject: TALK: How to Avoid Obfuscation using Witness PRFs

Abstract: 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 somewhat inefficient and rely on unnatural hardness assumptions about multilinear maps.

In this work, we seek to avoid the complexity associated with obfuscation. We show that, for several applications, a weaker primitive called witness pseudorandom functions (witness PRFs) suffices. 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 efficient than current obfuscation candidates, and involve very natural hardness assumptions about the underlying maps.

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See other events that are part of the Cryptography and Information Security Seminar Seminars Fall 2013 / Spring 2014.

Created by Holly A Jones Email at Friday, April 11, 2014 at 12:13 PM.