Comment by maria2
3 years ago
White box crypto is kind of like obfuscation, but tries to make it impossible to extract the information.
3 years ago
White box crypto is kind of like obfuscation, but tries to make it impossible to extract the information.
No, encryption is very different from obfuscation, even if the former is often used in the latter
You missed the point. maria2 is talking about whitebox crypto. The "whitebox" part means that the decryption process happens on your machine incuding the secrets, which are present in some obfuscated scrambled form in memory. Getting the secret key is a matter of debugging and understanding the obfuscation scheme. A prime example of this is DRM like Widevine (L3) in the chrome browser.
I am really failing to understand the distinction here. Encryption with say, AES has very different properties and use cases compared to an obfuscation scheme. You can use encryption as a part of an obfuscation scheme, but obfuscation is a shell game, all the way down. Crypto is not, mathematically. They are categorically different things, right?
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There's also indistinguishability obfuscation which I recall recently had a breakthrough in terms of practical construction