What is "blinding"

Blind \Blind\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Blinded; p. pr. & vb. n. Blinding.]

1. To make blind; to deprive of sight or discernment. ``To blind the truth and me.''
   --Tennyson.

   A blind guide is certainly a great mischief; but a guide that blinds those whom he should lead is . . . a much greater.
   --South.

2. To deprive partially of vision; to make vision difficult for and painful to; to dazzle.

   Her beauty all the rest did blind.
   --P. Fletcher.

3. To darken; to obscure to the eye or understanding; to conceal; to deceive.

   Such darkness blinds the sky.
   --Dryden.

   The state of the controversy between us he endeavored, with all his art, to blind and confound.
   --Stillingfleet.

4. To cover with a thin coating of sand and fine gravel; as a road newly paved, in order that the joints between the stones may be filled.

Blinding \Blind"ing\, a. Making blind or as if blind; depriving of sight or of understanding; obscuring; as, blinding tears; blinding snow.

Blinding \Blind"ing\, n. A thin coating of sand and fine gravel over a newly paved road. See Blind, v. t., 4.

1784, past participle adjective from blind (v.). Related: Blindingly.\n

1. 1 Very bright (as if to cause blindness). 2 Making blind or as if blind; depriving of sight or of understanding. 3 (lb en UK slang) brilliant; marvellous. adv. (context neologism English) To an extreme degree; blindingly. n. 1 The act of causing blindness. 2 A thin coat of sand or gravel used to fill holes in a new road surface. 3 A thin sprinkling of sand or chippings laid on a newly tarred surface. v

2. (present participle of blind English)

adj. shining intensely; "the blazing sun"; "blinding headlights"; "dazzling snow"; "fulgent patterns of sunlight"; "the glaring sun" [syn: blazing, dazzling, fulgent, glaring, glary]

Blinding is a novel in three volumes by the Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu. It consists of the installments Aripa stângă ("The left wing") from 1996, Corpul ("The body") from 2002, and Aripa dreaptă ("The right wing") from 2007. An English translation is set to be published in October 2013.

In cryptography, blinding is a technique by which an agent can provide a service to (i.e., compute a function for) a client in an encoded form without knowing either the real input or the real output. Blinding techniques also have applications to preventing side-channel attacks on encryption devices.

More precisely, Alice has an input x and Oscar has a function f. Alice would like Oscar to compute for her without revealing either x or y to him. The reason for her wanting this might be that she doesn't know the function f or that she does not have the resources to compute it. Alice "blinds" the message by encoding it into some other input E(x); the encoding E must be a bijection on the input space of f, ideally a random permutation. Oscar gives her f(E(x)), to which she applies a decoding D to obtain .

Not all functions allow for blind computation. At other times, blinding must be applied with care. An example of the latter is Rabin–Williams signatures. If blinding is applied to the formatted message but the random value does not honor Jacobi requirements on p and q, then it could lead to private key recovery. A demonstration of the recovery can be seen in CVE 2015-2141 discovered by Evgeny Sidorov.

The most common application of blinding is the blind signature. In a blind signature protocol, the signer digitally signs a message without being able to learn its content.

The OTP is an application of blinding to the secure communication problem, by its very nature. Alice would like to send a message to Bob secretly, however all of their communication can be read by Oscar. Therefore, Alice sends the message after blinding it with a secret key or OTP that she shares with Bob. Bob reverses the blinding after receiving the message. In this example, the function f is the identity and E and D are both typically the XOR operation.

Blinding can also be used to prevent certain side-channel attacks on asymmetric encryption schemes. Side-channel attacks allow an adversary to recover information about the input to a cryptographic operation, by measuring something other than the algorithm's result, e.g., power consumption, computation time, or radio-frequency emanations by a device. Typically these attacks depend on the attacker knowing the characteristics of the algorithm, as well as (some) inputs. In this setting, blinding serves to alter the algorithm's input into some unpredictable state. Depending on the characteristics of the blinding function, this can prevent some or all leakage of useful information. Note that security depends also on the resistance of the blinding functions themselves to side-channel attacks.

For example, in RSA blinding involves computing the blinding operation , where r is a random integer between 1 and N and relatively prime to N (i.e. , x is the plaintext, e is the public RSA exponent and N is the RSA modulus. As usual, the decryption function is applied thus giving . Finally it is unblinded using the function . Multiplying by yields , as desired. When decrypting in this manner, an adversary who is able to measure time taken by this operation would not be able to make use of this information (by applying timing attacks RSA is known to be vulnerable to) as she does not know the constant r and hence has no knowledge of the real input fed to the RSA primitives.

Blinding can refer to:

• The act of making someone blind
  • Blinding (punishment)
  • Metaphorical and extended uses of same: see blindness#Metaphorical uses
• The grammatically incorrect use of installing blinds
• Blinding (cryptography), a technique by which an agent can provide a service to (i.e., compute a function for) a client in an encoded form without knowing either the real input or the real output
• Blinding (novel), a novel in three volumes by Mircea Cărtărescu
• "Blinding", a song from Florence and the Machine's debut album, Lungs
• A blind experiment, in which the researcher is not aware of which data points were generated by an intervention

Blinding is a type of physical punishment which results in complete or nearly complete loss of vision. It has been used as an act of vengeance and torture.

The method has been known since Antiquity. The Greek mythology makes several references to blinding as divine punishment, which reflects human practice. An example is Oedipus, who gouged out his own eyes after accidentally fulfilling the prophecy that he would end up killing his father and marrying his mother. In the Bible, Samson was blinded upon his capture by the Philistines.

Early Christians were often blinded as a penalty for their beliefs. For example, St. Lucy's torturers tore out her eyes. In the Middle Ages, blinding was used as a penalty for treachery or as a means of rendering a political opponent unable to rule and lead an army in war. In the 11th century, William the Conqueror used blinding as a punishment for rebellion to replace the death penalty in his laws for England. Henry I of England blinded William, Count of Mortain, who had fought against him at Tinchebray in 1106. He also ordered blinding and castration as a punishment for thieves. In 1014, the Byzantine emperor Basil II had 99 of every 100 captured Bulgarians blinded, leaving 150 one-eyed men to lead them back to their commander. Blinding was accomplished by gouging out the eyes, sometimes using a hot poker, and by pouring a boiling substance, such as vinegar, on them.

Blinding survives as a form of penalty in the modern era, especially as part of the sharia law. In 2003, a Pakistani court sentenced a man to be blinded after he subjected his fiancee to an acid attack resulting in loss of vision. The same sentence was given by an Iranian court in 2009 for a man who blinded Ameneh Bahrami in an acid attack; Bahrami eventually pardoned the attacker.