A friend once explained to me that the general goal of iO is basically DRM but with an inverted power dynamic: Imagine being able to deploy containers to cloud providers (AWS, GCP, etc.), whereby the Cloud provider cannot see what software you are running. Even if the government commanded them to do so. That's how I understand it, informally.
The formalisms of "indistinguishability" in the blog posts are indeed weird.
Some security proofs argue that an attacker cannot distinguish between some plaintext and a string of NUL bytes of the same length being encrypted just by observing ciphertexts. That seems to be what Vitalik is, vaguely, gesturing towards?
(I'm not affiliated with the author or any of their numerous projects, so take my remarks with an appropriate dose of salt.)
Thanks for this explanation. Wish he’d had it at the top of his post.
The formalisms are not an invention of the blog post, just the formal definition of iO
Correct, I didn't mean to make it sound like they were foreign to iO overall. Just that the formalisms were in the blog post.
(The iO research field, overall, is still pretty weird to me.)