Ruling out a black box obfuscator is extremely significant. This means that anything which provably obfuscates a program needs to exploit some special structure of the thing being obfuscated. In fact, they show it needs to exploit some super special structure, because even very easy classes of program to obfuscate can’t be obfuscated.
There are actually several strong connections between obfuscation and homomorphic encryption. For one, obfuscation implies homomorphic encryption. For two, their descriptions are very semantically similar. For three, the possibility of homomorphic encryption is precisely the thing that implies the impossibility of obfuscation.
Ruling out a black box obfuscator is extremely significant. This means that anything which provably obfuscates a program needs to exploit some special structure of the thing being obfuscated. In fact, they show it needs to exploit some super special structure, because even very easy classes of program to obfuscate can’t be obfuscated.
There are actually several strong connections between obfuscation and homomorphic encryption. For one, obfuscation implies homomorphic encryption. For two, their descriptions are very semantically similar. For three, the possibility of homomorphic encryption is precisely the thing that implies the impossibility of obfuscation.