English

Pronunciation

Verb

obfuscated

1. past of obfuscate

Obfuscation is the concealment of meaning in communication, making it confusing and harder to interpret.

Obfuscation may be used for many purposes. Doctors have been accused of using jargon to conceal unpleasant facts from a patient. American author Michael Crichton has claimed that medical writing is a "highly skilled, calculated attempt to confuse the reader". B. F. Skinner, noted psychologist, commented on medical notation as a form of multiple audience control which allows the doctor to communicate to the pharmacist things which might be opposed by the patient if they could understand it. Similarly text-based language, like gyaru-moji and some forms of leet are obfuscated to make them incomprehensible to outsiders.

In cryptography, obfuscation refers to encoding the input data before it is sent to a hash function or other encryption scheme. This technique helps to make brute force attacks unfeasible, as it is difficult to determine the correct cleartext.

In network security, obfuscation refers to methods used to obscure an attack payload from inspection by network protection systems.

See also

• Eschew obfuscation
• Plain English
• Politics and the English Language

References