Indistinguishability Obfuscation (iO) is a crytographic protocol which was thought to be impossible until Aayush Jain and his advisor Amit Sahai from UCLA, together with Huijia Lin from the University of Washington, published a paper acheived IO using standard security assumptions. The purpose of iO, as I understand it, is to allow two pieces of the same data to be encrypted with all but one element being different, e.g. a key, and it would be impossible to determine the difference by comparing the two encrypted results.
