About
What this is
This is a reference site about garbled circuits — the technique shown by
Andrew Yao at FOCS ’86 — not an organization. “garbled.foundation” is a
domain name chosen for the topic, in the same .foundation style as other
single-topic reference sites in this small network (see below) — it isn’t
the name of an institution, and nothing on this site should be read as one.
Why it exists
Garbled circuits are the kind of idea that sounds like magic until you actually see the construction — two parties computing a function of their private data without a trusted server, without either one seeing the other’s input, using nothing more exotic than SHA-256 and XOR. Most explanations either wave their hands at “encrypted truth tables” or dive straight into a research paper. This site tries to close that gap: a plain-spoken explanation, backed by working code and a live demo you can actually poke at, aimed at engineers rather than cryptographers.
Every historical claim and citation on this site is sourced to a specific paper or primary reference (see History and Further reading); nothing is stated from memory without a source. The interactive demo computes real values in your browser — see Interactive and Code — nothing is mocked or precomputed.
Part of a small network of reference sites
This site shares its design and editorial approach with a small, growing set of independent reference sites on specific cryptographic primitives: Pedersen Commitments (Torben Pedersen’s CRYPTO ’91 construction), VDF (Verifiable Delay Functions), zkSNARK (zk-SNARKs), and TEE (Trusted Execution Environments). Each covers one topic; none of them is an organization, and they aren’t affiliated with each other beyond sharing a template.
Who maintains this
This is an independent educational project maintained by one person, with public source and open contributions (see below). It is not affiliated with Andrew Yao, Oded Goldreich, Silvio Micali, Avi Wigderson, or any of the other researchers and organizations whose work it cites and links to.
Proposing a correction or addition
The site’s source is public on GitHub at github.com/Qubitpower/garbled-foundation. If you spot an error — a wrong date, a broken link, a mistake in one of the demos — please open an issue or a pull request there.