FAQ on Whitebox Cryptography posted December 2014

A great FAQ, written by Marc Joye (Thomson R&D), on Whitebox Cryptography.

http://joye.site88.net/papers/Joy08whitebox.pdf

Thansk Tancrède for the link!

Q1: What is white-box cryptography?
A major issue when dealing with security programs is the protection of "sensitive" (secret, confidential or private) data embedded in the code. The usual solution consists in encrypting the data but the legitimate user needs to get access to the decryption key, which also needs to be protected. This is even more challenging in a software-only solution, running on a non-trusted host.
White-box cryptography is aimed at protecting secret keys from being disclosed in a software implementation. In such a context, it is assumed that the attacker (usually a "legitimate" user or malicious software) may also control the execution environment. This is in contrast with the more traditional security model where the attacker is only given a black-box access (i.e., inputs/outputs) to the cryptographic algorithm under consideration.

Q2: What is the difference with code obfuscation?
Related and complementary techniques for protecting software implementations but with different security goals include code obfuscation and software tamper-resistance. Code obfuscation is aimed at protecting against the reverse engineering of a (cryptographic) algorithm while software tamper-resistance is aimed at protecting against modifications of the code.
All these techniques have however in common that the resulting implementation must remain directly executable.

Or as Francis Gabriel writes here

Code obfuscation means code protection. A piece of code which is obfuscated is modified in order to be harder to understand. As example, it is often used in DRM (Digital Rights Management) software to protect multimedia content by hiding secrets informations like algorithms and encryption keys.