We hear a lot about hacking these days: from the Target hack that affected over 100 million customers, to the Sony PlayStation Network hack that made international headlines. It just seems that no piece of software is impenetrable, even if strong encryption protocols are in place. So how can we protect our data? If we’re lucky, we’ll soon be using new security protocols developed by computer scientists that are so solid, their creators are calling it unhackable.
A team of researchers from IBM and Microsoft may have just made a breakthrough in the quest for unbreakable cryptography. The results produced by the team from UCLA and MIT offer hope that encryption could protect not just an output, but an entire program. Once believed to be too powerful to exist in any real sense, this new method of program obfuscation could lead to ultra-secure software that keeps your personal information safe from nefarious individuals. The idea of obfuscating a program has been around for decades — software companies have tried all sorts of methods to distort their code in order to prevent others from seeing how it worked.