Enhanced public key security for the McEliece cryptosystem

Abstract

This paper studies a variant of the McEliece cryptosystem able to ensure that the code used as the public key is no longer permutation equivalent to the secret code. This increases the security level of the public key, thus opening the way for reconsidering the adoption of classical families of codes, like Reed–Solomon codes, that have been longly excluded from the McEliece cryptosystem for security reasons. It is well known that codes of these classes are able to yield a reduction in the key size or, equivalently, an increased level Show more