Vitalik lands on local mixing as obfuscation series reaches third stage

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has published the third installment of his cryptographic obfuscation series on Friday. 

He examined a method called “local mixing” that throws out lattices and elliptic curves in favor of ideas lifted from hash function design.

Buterin had published Part I on June 29, and the second one, which is the diamond iO writeup, was published on July 28. 

In those publications, he touched on lattice-heavy constructions. With local mixing, Buterin said that it is “a totally different way of doing cryptography.” In his post, he wrote that local mixing has no elliptic curves, no prime factorization, and no lattices anywhere in the design.

According to Buterin, the closest relative to local mixing is symmetric cryptography, which is the discipline behind everyday encryption and hashing.

Junk gates and a circuit run in reverse

The local mixing process starts with a circuit made of logic gates such as XOR, AND, and NOT, that goes through a pipeline that keeps the output identical while it scrubs away any trace of the internal logic.

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