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On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs

Posted by timothy on from the bold-words dept.

sl956 writes: "We all know that anybody using the words 'tamper resistant' to describe a software-based solution is incompetent at best. But some of the big players in the DRM field are believing in software-only protection schemes (see Cloakware, Hitachi, IBM or Intel). A mostly unnoticed paper presented to CRYPTO'01 (Santa Barbara, CA, August 19-23, 2001, LNCS vol.2139) *proved* the impossibility of efficiently obfuscating programs. It is the mathematical proof of the impossibility of a software-only DRM system on an untrusted client such as a PC. There are also a lot of interesting theoretical side-effects. You can read the html abstract here, or the postcript full paper here." The paper is from last year, but that doesn't make its conclusion less interesting. (Of course, even hardware isn't always all that secure, either.)

2 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. proofs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    i have a mathematical proof that shows the impossibility of mathematical proofs, but i can't get it past the lameness filter.

  2. Re:Yes, this is actually a problem... by Alsee · · Score: 4, Funny

    XORing it with the number 0x42

    The correct value should be 0xDEADBEEF.

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