Public-coin differing-inputs obfuscation and its applications

Differing inputs obfuscation (diO) is a strengthening of in-distinguishability obfuscation (iO) that has recently found applications to improving the efficiency and generality of obfuscation, functional encryption, and related primitives. Roughly speaking, a diO scheme ensures that the obfuscations of two efficiently generated programs are indistinguishable not only if the two programs are equivalent, but also if it is hard to find an input on which their outputs differ. The above "indistin-guishability" and "hardness" conditions should hold even in the presence of an auxiliary input that is generated together with the programs.The recent works of Boyle and Pass (ePrint 2013) and Garg et al. (Crypto 2014) cast serious doubt on the plausibility of general-purpose diO with respect to general auxiliary inputs. This leaves open the existence of a variant of diO that is plausible, simple, and useful for applications.We suggest such a diO variant that we call public-coin diO. A public-coin diO restricts the original definition of diO by requiring the auxiliary input to be a public random string which is given as input to all relevant algorithms. In contrast to standard diO, we argue that it remains very plausible that current candidate constructions of iO for circuits satisfy the public-coin diO requirement.We demonstrate the usefulness of the new notion by showing that several applications of diO can be obtained by relying on the public-coin.