A professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and his team of computer scientists have designed a system that encrypts software so that it can run in that encrypted state.
Why is it such an important breakthrough? Whenever a security patch comes out for your operating system or software on your computer, hackers start to reverse-engineer it to find out the vulnerability it is intended to fix. With this knowledge, they are able to attack vulnerable computers before the update gets applied.
The researchers at UCLA, the university that has given the world 12 Nobel laureates, have developed a system that goes one step beyond the everyday encryption we all use when communicate or pay online. With their “mathematical jigsaw puzzle” approach they are able to accomplish the task to actually run the software while still being encrypted, which has never been possible before.
Software developers can write their software in the usual way, and then feed it to the system. It will output a fully functional but mathematically transformed piece of software. This is achieved by a new type of multilinear jigsaw puzzle that returns a jumble of numbers impossible to reverse-engineer. The new technique paves the way for functional encryption, offering a much more secure way to protect information.
