Strengthening McEliece public-key cryptosystem.

Pierre Loidreau
INRIA, projet CODES
BP 105
78153 Le Chesnay Cedex, France
Pierre.Loidreau@inria.fr

In Advances in Cryptology - ASIACRYPT 2000, number 1976 in LNCS, pages 585-598. Springer-Verlag, December 2000.

Abstract

McEliece cryptosystem is a public-key cryptosystem based on error-correcting codes. It constitutes one of the few alternatives to cryptosystems relying on number theory. We present a modification of the McEliece cryptosystem which strengthens its security without increasing the size of the public key. We show that it is possible to use some properties of the automorphism groups of the codes to build decodable patterns of large weight errors. This greatly strengthens the system against the decoding attacks.