Vitalik Buterin Releases "Partly Homomorphic" Cryptographic Research: Explores Next-Generation Obfuscation Techniques, Could Become a New Cryptographic Primitive

BlockBeats News, August 21st, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released the latest article "Obfuscation (Part 3): Local Mixing," delving into a cryptography obfuscation technology route under exploration - "Local Mixing," and referred to it as a potential new cryptographic foundational tool after elliptic curves, RSA, and lattice cryptography.

Vitalik stated that current mainstream obfuscation technologies mainly rely on complex mathematical assumptions, often with very high computational costs; however, local mixing takes a completely different approach, not relying on elliptic curves, integer factorization, or lattice cryptography, but drawing inspiration from symmetric cryptography and hash function design experience. By continuously shuffling, restructuring, and concealing circuit structures while maintaining functionality unchanged to eliminate information leakage. The main steps of local mixing technology include reversibility, hardening, mixing, splitting, crossing walk, and "gadgetization," adding random structures to the circuit, rearranging logic gates, and nonlinear hiding mechanisms to make it difficult for attackers to recover the original computing logic.

Vitalik pointed out that this technology is still in its early stages, with security yet to undergo long-term validation, facing challenges such as random attacks and linear analysis. However, he believes that local mixing represents a new path for cryptographic exploration, aiming to build more efficient indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) schemes. If local mixing technology makes a breakthrough, it may lead to new post-quantum public key encryption schemes and drive the development of general obfuscation technology. The field still requires years of cryptanalysis and optimization validation, but AI-assisted research may significantly accelerate this maturation process.

Vitalik stated that obfuscation technology is considered the "last frontier" of cryptography because theoretically, other cryptographic primitives can be built based on obfuscation and one-way functions. Local mixing may not only reduce the cost of traditional obfuscation schemes but also become an important direction for future cryptographic infrastructure.