International Association
for Cryptologic Research

At ITCS 2020, Bartusek et al. proposed a candidate indistinguishability obfuscator (iO) for affine determinant programs (ADPs). The candidate is special since it is the only unbroken candidate iO to date that does not rely on the hardness of traditional cryptographic assumptions like discrete-log or learning with errors. Instead, it directly applies specific randomization techniques to the underlying ADP. It is relatively efficient compared to the rest of the iO candidates. However, the obfuscation scheme requires further cryptanalysis since it was not known to be based on any well-formed mathematical assumptions. In this paper, we show cryptanalytic attacks on the iO candidate provided by Bartusek et al. Our attack exploits the weakness of one of the randomization steps in the candidate. The attack applies to a fairly general class of programs. At the end of the paper we discuss plausible countermeasures to defend against our attacks.