Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the Taifab, has recently started publishing a set of technical articles on the confusion of procedures. He indicated that this was probably one of the most powerful ideas in cryptography, but that at this stage there was still a long distance from actual deployment and that the main problem was inefficient operations.
The goal is to hide the code itself.
Buterin's discussion focused on “indistinguishable confusion”. The goal of such technologies is not to hide the data entered or traded, but to hide the internal logic of the programme itself. In other words, the programme can be seen from the outside and get results, but it is difficult to judge how it actually works within.
He summarized the idea as “hidden code, not data”. In his view, if such tools matured in the future, they could serve as a neutral implementer without trust in certain scenarios.
Area chain fills state management issues
Buterin argued that procedural confusion, when combined with block chains, could theoretically support more complex low-trust applications, such as more private and less collusive voting systems.
This is due to the fact that confused procedures cannot by themselves prevent replication and therefore make it difficult to secure separate tasks requiring a continuing record-keeping status, such as account balances and funds transfers. And the block chain just happens to carry this part of the state management function.
Research has progressed, but performance is still too slow
He mentioned that the idealized programme of procedural confusion had proved to be unworkable as early as 2001, after which the direction of the study shifted to a weaker iO. Over the past two decades, there have been repeated failures in this area.
Recent progress is that researchers have been able to construct iO under relatively reasonable safety assumptions. However, the current operational costs are still very high. Buterin describes it as being so slow that it can hardly be used in the real environment that at this stage it is more like a research milestone than an online product.
It's not the same problem as Monroe.
Buterin also explained why the existence of private currency did not mean that the issue had been resolved. In the case of Menrococo, for example, it mainly hides transaction data, such as payment parties and amounts, rather than the logic of the process itself.
This is why he continues to discuss procedural confusion. Instruments such as Menrocoin have provided trade privacy in the chain, but the “hidden code” has not yet entered the production environment.
He also compared the current phase to zero knowledge attests to early development. SNARK also stayed in the theoretical and experimental stages more than a decade ago, and after many years of optimization, became an important infrastructure for the expansion of the Ether. In this logic, the confusion of procedures may also advance along similar paths in the future, but in the short term it remains difficult.