Is Indistinguishability Obfuscation Real?
First, the wikipedia article stated that the assumption required a PRG with an exponential stretch. This is not correct, and I have edited the article. Rather, the requirement is for a PRG in $NC_0$ with super-linear stretch (i.e., stretching from $n$ to $n^{1+\tau}$ for any $\tau&gt;0$). This is indeed not known, as far as I could ascertain from a brief search, but if you are really interested I suggest that you contact Benny Applebaum and ask him what the current status is on this question. Note that the other assumptions in the paper are also pretty strong but are just much more reasonable than everything we had until now. So, can we say that we have iO unless a lot of what we believe in crypto breaks? Probably not yet. But we are much closer to that now.
Note that the fact that the existence of something relates to P/NP and other questions does not mean anything. Almost all of crypto relies on assumptions (e.g., there is no public-key cryptography if $P=NP$). The question is only whether or not these assumptions are what we call &quot;standard&quot; or not.