Boaz Barak
More info
- Affiliation
- Harvard University
- Known for
- Impossibility of obfuscation
Lead author of the paper proving that perfect code obfuscation is impossible, which in the same breath defined the weaker notion that later became one of cryptography's hottest questions.
"On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs" (2001) was written by Barak, Oded Goldreich, Russell Impagliazzo, Steven Rudich, Amit Sahai, Salil Vadhan and Ke Yang. They built programs that cannot be obfuscated into black boxes, however clever the obfuscator. Anyone selling "unbreakable" code scrambling therefore has a mathematical problem.
The paper also introduced indistinguishability obfuscation, which got its first candidate construction only in 2013 and has since been treated as a kind of universal tool. Barak also co-wrote the textbook Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach (2009) with Sanjeev Arora.