Indistinguishability Obfuscation (at long last!)

In this Quanta Magazine article, the author summarizes some new work that makes iO (indistinguishability obfuscation) sound like something we may actually achieve in the near future. Up to this point, crypographers have been unable to make iO usable in any real-world situation. It is a sort of "ring of power" (one ring to rule them all!) of cryptography which we have all assumed was too good to be true. The new idea, described originally in this paper uses only standard security assumptions (i.e. things like the assumption that computers will never be able to quickly factor products of large primes). The actual four assumptions in the paper sound a bit more complicated, but are in fact standard. I don't really understand all of the details or implications of iO, but this is a huge result in cryptography and it sounds like because of this, we may end up with overall better data security.

Alex