Indian develops tech to make software unhackable

A unique system has been designed by researchers that will encrypt software in order to make it impervious to reverse-engineering.

UCLA computer science professor Amit Sahaiand a team of researchers have developed a system which will only allow someone to use a programme as intended, while preventing any deciphering of the code behind it.

This is known as software obfuscation in computer science and it is the first time it has been accomplished.

Sahai said that the new system puts up an iron wall making it impossible for an adversary to reverse-engineer the software without solving mathematical problems that take hundreds of years to work out on today's computers.

The researchers said their mathematical obfuscation mechanism can be used to protectintellectual property by preventing the theft of new algorithms and by hiding the vulnerability a software patch is designed to repair when the patch is distributed.

The key to this successful obfuscation mechanism is a new type of multilinear jigsaw puzzle. This new technique has paved the way for another breakthrough called functional encryption.