Mastering Blockchain - Second Edition

Indistinguishability Obfuscation

This cryptographic technique may serve as a silver bullet to all privacy and confidentiality issues in blockchains but the technology is not yet ready for production deployments. IO allows for code obfuscation, which is a very ripe research topic in cryptography and, if applied to blockchains, can serve as an unbreakable obfuscation mechanism that will turn smart contracts into a black box.

The key idea behind IO is what's called by researchers a multilinear jigsaw puzzle, which basically obfuscates program code by mixing it with random elements, and if the program is run as intended, it will produce expected output but any other way of executing would render the program look random and garbage. This idea ...