Blurry Box Encryption Scheme and Why it Matters to Industrial IoT
3.2 THE NEW PARADIGM
In an ideal world, a copy protection scheme would be able to turn arbitrary software into a black box: That is, attackers could observe input and output in regular use, but nothing else. Particularly, the inner workings of the algorithms are hidden. Unfortunately, this has proven impossible to achieve 4. Even with such a black-box, it would be impossible to prevent an attacker from executing the software regularly, analyzing all observations, and reconstructing the software.
From a theoretical perspective, within the purview of secure multi-party computation, there are methods to evaluate a function securely, so that only its result is revealed to anyone. However, these solutions often provide only basic functionalities and are limited in that they are only secure on their own and cannot be used within a larger context. Moreover, while some functionalities, such as either addition or multiplication, can be realized efficiently in practice, they cannot be used together with the same constructions. There are constructions that do so, but they are of only theoretical interest for the time being, because of performance constraints of their implementations. An example of this is fully homomorphic encryption and various constructions using it 5.
In this article, we present a new paradigm for copy protection, known as the“ Blurry Box ® Scheme,” which is based on an assumption about the complexity of software. To our knowledge, this is the first scheme that has a provable security property and is useable in practice. Informally speaking, it proves that the attacker cannot learn more about the software than if he tried to iterate every possible path through the program.
4. THE BLURRY BOX SCHEME
4.1 MECHANISMS
At its core, Blurry Box is based on the assumption that a hacker lacks the domain knowledge necessary to create a software product. For instance, a hacker may not be familiar with the underlying mathematics of a computer algebra system. The rationale behind this is that a hacker who knows the relevant domain knowledge could write the software himself, bypassing the protection altogether. One cannot protect software against such a hacker. This assumption is therefore justified and necessary.
This lack of domain knowledge can be exploited to achieve secure protection. The main idea is to split the program code into small pieces to make it practically infeasible to retrieve all pieces
4
Barak, B., Goldreich, O., Impagliazzo, R., Rudich, S., Sahai, A., Vadhan, S., & Yang, K,“ On the( im) possibility of obfuscating programs,” Annual International Cryptology Conference( pp. 1-18), Springer Berlin Heidelberg, August 2001.
5
Craig Gentry,“ Fully homomorphic encryption using ideal lattices,” Symposium on the Theory of Computing( STOC), pp. 169- 178, 2009
IIC Journal of Innovation- 9-