Building secure blackout has proven brutally difficult. An ideal version proved impossible in 2001, leading researchers to look instead for the weaker iO target, a roughly twenty-year effort littered with failed attempts. The recent good news is that iO can now be built under reasonable security assumptions.
The downside, however, is that the runtimes are, in Buterin’s words, “galactic,” efficient on paper but absurdly slow in practice.
Buterin compared the moment to SNARKs, the zero-knowledge proofs now central to Ethereum’s scaling, circa 2010, before years of optimization turned them from a curiosity into a working infrastructure. The suggestion is that blackout could follow the same path from theoretical breakthrough to useful tool, even if a single test today would be hopelessly expensive.
Privacy coins like Monero (XMR) already hide things on a live blockchain, so why does Buterin consider this unsolved? Because they hide different things. Monero hides transaction data, such as who paid whom and how much, via ring signatures, stealth addresses and confidential amounts.
Obfuscation in Buterin’s sense hides the logic of the program, the code itself, and not the data flowing through it. As he puts it: iO hides the code, not the data. Monero has been doing transaction privacy for over a decade, but program obfuscation has never been in production anywhere, and closing that gap is what his post is about.
Credit : cryptonews.net
