New Software To Balance Privacy and Security?

An anonymous reader writes "Claiming to provide both security and privacy, researchers at UCLA say they have developed a system to monitor suspicious online communication that discards communications from law-abiding citizens before they ever reach the intelligence community." From the article: "The truly revolutionary facet of the technology is that it is a new and powerful example of a piece of code that has been mathematically proven to be impossible to reverse-engineer. In other words, it can't be analyzed to figure out its components, construction and inner workings, or reveal what information it's collecting and what information it's discarding -- it won't give up its secrets. It can't be manipulated or turned against the user."

Comments

Impossible to reverse engineer?

[jonwil]

Which CPU does it run on?
Which executable format does it use?
Unless its running on dedicated hardware with really strong encryption (and even then, thats no gaurantee), it is possible to reverse engineer any piece of code piece by piece (for example, start with the first instructions the program executes and unwrap it from there). If you wanted to go deep, you could use an ICE or similar (or a software emulator with a built-in debugger that cant be detected from the emulated side)

Here's a more informed article on this software

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.research.ucla.edu/tech/ucla05-487.htm

Re:Impossible to reverse engineer!

[drnlm]

Based on the very little information available in the article, this sounds like an offshoot of the work on interactive proofs, and the UCLA professor quoted does indeed seem to have done some work in the field - see http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~rafail/PUBLIC/index.html for his publications.

A glance at the paper titles suggests "Private Searching on Streaming Data" as being the closest to the original article.