Lack of security in electronic communications can either be seen as a problem, or an asset, depending on your viewpoint. Either way, it’s a given that a great deal of high-end cryptographic research is currently underway. Accounts of recent progress can be found via Professor Mihir Bellare’s web page at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, US.
For example, the professor has developed, along with colleagues Viet Tung Hoang and Phillip Rogaway, a highly optimised garbling scheme. See: ‘Foundations of garbled circuits.’ (in: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), ACM, 2012. )
“Starting from a PRF [pseudorandom function] , we provide an efficient garbling scheme achieving privacy and we analyze its concrete security. We next consider obliviousness and authenticity, properties needed for private and verifiable outsourcing of computation.”
Full paper here : (45 pages, pdf)
Note: The professor also provides ‘An Automatic Crypto Research Topic or Paper Title Generator.’
BONUS paper : Leakage* by Daniel J. Bernstein, University of Illinois, Chicago : Ian Goldberg, University of Waterloo : Nadia Heninger, UCSD : Kevin S. McCurley, Google : and Moti Yung, Google. (Journal of Craptology : current issue, volume 8)
Improbable has not been able to determine whether this paper may, or may not, support tests for ‘Plausible Deniability‘.
Also see: The Index of Garbledness