"UCLA Computer Grad Constructs 'Crown Jewel of Cryptography'"

Aayush Jain received the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation entitled "Indistinguishability Obfuscation From Well-Studied Assumptions." From well-studied hardness conjectures, Jain's dissertation established the feasibility of mathematically rigorous software obfuscation. The primary objective of software obfuscation is to render source code unintelligible without altering its functionality. Additional conditions can be added, such as requiring the transformed code to perform similarly to the original or even the same. As a mechanism for software security, software obfuscation must have a solid mathematical foundation. The mathematical object that Jain's thesis creates, indistinguishability obfuscation, is regarded as a "master tool" in the context of cryptography, not only for achieving long-desired cryptographic goals such as functional encryption but also for broadening the field of cryptography itself. For example, indistinguishability obfuscation helps achieve software security objectives that were previously only in software engineering. This article continues to discuss Jain's dissertation "Indistinguishability Obfuscation From Well-Studied Assumptions."

ACM reports "UCLA Computer Grad Constructs 'Crown Jewel of Cryptography'"