Towards working with small atomic functions

Abstract

Shannon's notion of entropy remains a benchmark reference for understanding information and data content of cryptosystems. Ideally, secure ciphers maintain high entropy between possible plaintext-ciphertext pairs. The one time pad, though perfectly secure in terms of entropy, remains impractical in most general cases due to key management issues. We discuss in this paper the similar notion of function entropy and examine its use on a small scale to provide perfect functional secrecy. We illustrate how such small units of composition can form the basis for obfuscating software transformations in a general, but highly constrained sense. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.