July 31, 2026
Secrets, schemes, and side-eye
Obfuscation (Part II): Diamond IO
This 'hidden code' breakthrough sounds huge, but the comments went straight to secret-sharing déjà vu
TLDR: A new cryptography idea claims it could make “hidden code” far less impossibly slow, which matters because it could one day let people use software without seeing its secret guts. The community’s instant reaction was skeptical and cheeky, with readers comparing the big new idea to older secret-sharing math.
Crypto fans were handed another chapter in the saga of “can we hide a program without breaking the universe first?” and, honestly, the crowd seems equal parts impressed, dizzy, and ready to roast. The big claim in the post is that a newer method called diamond iO could shrink the runtime from “galactic” to merely “planetary”. Translation for non-math mortals: it still wouldn’t be practical today, but it’s no longer in the same category as see you after the heat death of the cosmos. That alone gave the piece a whiff of sci-fi thriller energy.
But the real sparkle came from the comment section, where readers did what readers do best: instantly compare the shiny new thing to an older classic and ask whether we’ve seen this movie before. The standout reaction came from stevefan1999, who looked at the scheme and basically went, wait... why does this look like Shamir’s secret sharing? In one line, the comment turned a dense cryptography explainer into a mini-drama about originality, pattern recognition, and whether ultra-advanced math sometimes feels like the same tricks wearing fancier outfits.
That’s the vibe here: cautious awe mixed with eyebrow-raising skepticism. The article says this approach could move hidden-program tech a few steps closer to reality, especially for software that contains secret keys. The community mood, though, is gloriously suspicious and a little amused: is this a breakthrough, or just old wizardry in a new cloak?
Key Points
- •The article introduces diamond iO as an alternative obfuscation construction in a series on cryptographic obfuscation.
- •Earlier obfuscation protocols are described as having impractically large runtimes, while diamond iO reduces this significantly though it remains infeasible today.
- •Diamond iO is built by modifying the BGG+14 attribute-based encryption scheme discussed in the prior post.
- •Compared with traditional iO constructions, diamond iO changes both the conditional FHE decryption mechanism and the generation of input encodings.
- •The article explains that BGG+14 uses matrix-based encodings tied to circuit wires, and diamond iO preserves output-wire-specific decryption constraints while extracting needed data differently from the encoding.