English

Hindering reaction attacks by using monomial codes in the McEliece cryptosystem

Information Theory 2018-05-15 v1 Cryptography and Security math.IT

Abstract

In this paper we study recent reaction attacks against QC-LDPC and QC-MDPC code-based cryptosystems, which allow an opponent to recover the private parity-check matrix through its distance spectrum by observing a sufficiently high number of decryption failures. We consider a special class of codes, known as monomial codes, to form private keys with the desirable property of having a unique and complete distance spectrum. We verify that for these codes the problem of recovering the secret key from the distance spectrum is equivalent to that of finding cliques in a graph, and use this equivalence to prove that current reaction attacks are not applicable when codes of this type are used in the McEliece cryptosystem.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.04722,
  title  = {Hindering reaction attacks by using monomial codes in the McEliece cryptosystem},
  author = {Paolo Santini and Marco Baldi and Giovanni Cancellieri and Franco Chiaraluce},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.04722},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

5 pages, 0 figures, 1 table, accepted for presentation at the 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:52:52.711Z