In other news, a lot of recent effort in cryptography has gone toward the study of so-called "indistinguishability obfuscation." The idea is much what you'd thi

In other news, a lot of recent effort in cryptography has gone toward the study of so-called "indistinguishability obfuscation." The idea is much what you'd think from the word obfuscation: you want a scheme that garbles a program in such a way that you can still run it but can't read the source code. The technical conditions are a bit more specific (that an attacker can't distinguish between the encryptions of two functionally equivalent programs), but the study of indistinguishability obfuscation (abbreviated iO), has been called a "watershed" in cryptography.