Secure and Compact: A New Variant of McEliece Cryptosystem
Ekta Bindal, Abhay Kumar Singh · IEEE Access · 2024
This paper introduces a variant of the McEliece cryptosystem and employs the (C1,C1+C2)-construction to generate a new code from two arbitrary linear codes. We propose an efficient hard-decision decoding algorithm for linear codes derived from the (C1,C1+C2)-construction and integrate them into the McEliece framework. The security of the cryptosystem varies based on the specific codes used in the (C1,C1+C2)-construction. Our proposed variant achieves a good level of security with approximately the same key size compared to one of the classic McEliece candidates of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) [1] standardization process. Specifically, we demonstrate a 25% key size reduction for our proposed parameters compared to one of the 256-bit secured classic McEliece parameters.