Iamge: Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine
Indistinguishability Obfuscation (iO) is a crytographic protocol which was thought to be impossible until Aayush Jain and his advisor Amit Sahai from UCLA, together with Huijia Lin from the University of Washington, published a paper acheived IO using standard security assumptions. The purpose of iO, as I understand it, is to allow two pieces of the same data to be encrypted with all but one element being different, e.g. a key, and it would be impossible to determine the difference by comparing the two encrypted results. Quantim magazine have a fascinating long read on the discovery, including the workarounds carried out to achieve sub degree 3 multi-linear maps.
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