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ETH Vitalik Buterin releases the third article in his crypto obfuscation series: Exploring "Local Mixing" Methods
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released the third article in his crypto obfuscation series on Friday. He studied an approach called "local mixing" that abandons lattice ciphers and elliptic curves in favor of concepts drawn from hash function design.
Buterin previously released the first article in the series on June 29, and the second article on "Diamond iO" was released on July 28. In the first two articles, he explored the construction of lattice ciphers. For local mixing, Buterin said it was a "completely different way of cryptography." He wrote in the article that there are no elliptic curves, no prime factorizations, and no lattice ciphers in the local hybrid design.
According to Buterin, the area closest to local mixing is symmetric cryptography-the discipline behind daily encryption and hashing operations.
Garbage gate and circuit running in reverse
The local mixing process begins with a circuit composed of logic gates such as XOR, AND, NOT, etc., which passes through a pipeline that wipes out any traces of internal logic while keeping the output unchanged. Buterin writes that local mixing goes through the following raw circuit flow: adding reversibility, hardening, gadgetization, mixing, and finally obfuscation.
During the mixing process, garbage doors are scattered into the circuit. Subsequently, the circuit layout was re-scrambled and the small blocks of logic gates were replaced with different gates that calculated the same result. However, this step alone is not enough, so other steps take on most of the work, and they are crucial.
Reversibility comes first because it makes subsequent steps possible. Buterin explained that a reversible gate can be rewritten as a set of other reversible gates with matching behaviors. This is difficult to achieve for AND or OR gates.
A bet built on past failures
Buterin still calls local mixing "a crazy and risky bet" and writes that it sits on "the graveyard of failed attempts at white-box cryptography." However, he pointed out that local mixed authors said the concept might hold if they put in more effort and were willing to accept higher costs.
One of the proposed shortcuts is artificial intelligence, which can compress hash function research that takes thirty years to mature into just a few years. However, this deviates from the line based on trellis ciphers, which has trade-offs in security assumptions.
Buterin once called confusion "the ultimate Boss of cryptography" in his June article, and in his latest article he called it "the ultimate frontier of cryptography." He said that the most rigorous structures require operating times that are "astronomical" and longer than the lifetime of the universe.
Why is confusion worth the trouble?
Through obfuscation, you can convert a program into an encrypted version that still runs on normal input while returning normal output, but hides the code itself. When obfuscation is combined with blockchain, it approaches a "trusted third party without trust" capable of enabling things such as private, collusion-resistant voting without relying on any M-of-N committee.
