A Decoder for a Lightweight McEliece Cryptosystem Based on Concatenated Codes
Johann-Philipp Thiers, Jürgen Freudenberger · IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine · 2022
Large-scale quantum computers threaten the security of today's public-key cryptography. The McEliece cryptosystem is one of the most promising candidates for postquantum cryptography. However, the McEliece system has the drawback of large key sizes for the public key. Similar to other public-key cryptosystems, the McEliece system has a comparably high computational complexity. Embedded devices often lack the required computational resources to compute those systems with sufficiently low latency. Hence, those systems require hardware acceleration. Lately, a generalized concatenated code construction was proposed together with a restrictive channel model, which allows for much smaller public keys for comparable security levels. In this work, we propose a hardware decoder suitable for a McEliece system based on these generalized concatenated codes. The results show that those systems are suitable for resource-constrained embedded devices.