Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described cryptographic obfuscation as the “final boss of cryptography,” outlining indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) as a decades-long research target that remains far from practical deployment.
In a blog post published Monday, Buterin explained that obfuscation allows a program to be converted into an "encrypted program" that can be executed on cleartext inputs without revealing the underlying code.
When combined with a blockchain, obfuscation enables protocols that approach the theoretical ideal of a "trustless trusted third party," including a secure, private, and collusion-resistant voting system that requires "almost no trust assumption at all" and operates without an M-of-N threshold committee, according to the post.
However, building a secure form of obfuscation is “really really hard,” Buterin wrote. Current iO constructions are technically polynomial but still require "literally galactic" runtimes, per the post.
Buterin attributed the overhead to multi-layered constructions stacking primitives including fully homomorphic encryption, functional encryption, and lattice-based tools. Expected runtimes for provably secure schemes exceed the lifetime of the universe, he noted.
