Vitalik Buterin outlines Diamond iO cryptographic obfuscation method
Ethereum co-founder describes Diamond iO as an early-stage program obfuscation approach that modifies BGG+14 and nests fully homomorphic encryption inside attribute-based encryption to improve feasibility over earlier impractical designs.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a technical article describing Diamond iO, a program obfuscation method intended to make indistinguishability obfuscation more practical. He said the design improves on earlier conservative schemes viewed as so computationally demanding they would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to run. A July 29 report said Diamond iO modifies the BGG+14 attribute-based encryption scheme and uses fully homomorphic encryption nested inside attribute-based encryption through three core mechanisms. Buterin said this cuts runtime from beyond the lifetime of the universe to a stage that is no longer absolutely impossible, while cautioning that the work remains early-stage and depends on unproven assumptions including All-Product LWE and Evasive LWE.
- indistinguishability obfuscation: A cryptographic technique that aims to hide how a program works while preserving its functionality.
- attribute-based encryption: An encryption method that grants decryption rights based on specified attributes rather than a single key.
- fully homomorphic encryption: Encryption that allows computations to be performed on data while it remains encrypted.