Title: Critical attacks in code-based cryptography

Authors: Pierre-Louis Cayrel; Cheikh T. Gueye; Ousmane Ndiaye; Robert Niebuhr

Addresses: Laboratoire Hubert Curien, UMR CNRS 5516, Bâtiment F 18 rue du proesseur Benoît Lauras, 42000 Saint-Etienne, France ' Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, FST, DMI, LACGAA, Senegal ' Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, FST, DMI, LACGAA, Senegal ' CASED – Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt, Mornewegstrasse, 32 64293 Darmstadt, Germany

Abstract: Code-based cryptographic schemes are promising candidates for post-quantum cryptography since they are fast, require only basic arithmetic, and have a well understood security. While there is strong evidence that cryptosystems like McEliece and Niederreiter are secure, they have certain weaknesses when used without semantic conversions. Critical attacks generally can't be avoided by increasing the key size of several code-based cryptosystems. In this paper we present a survey on critical attacks in code-based cryptography and we propose a specific conversion with a smaller redundancy of data than Korara's et al. and which protects against CCA2. Our purpose is to evaluate three cryptosystems: McEliece, Niederreiter and HyMES. We analyse their security against several models such as: Broadcast, Known Partial plaintext, Message-resend, Related-message, Chosen ciphertext, Lunchtime, Reaction attack and Malleability. Our work follows a first work done by Imai and Kobara (2001) which does not cover the whole known attacks and does not deal with the HyMES scheme.

Keywords: code-based cryptography; critical attacks; CCA2; provable security; random oracle model; data redundancy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICOT.2015.072639

International Journal of Information and Coding Theory, 2015 Vol.3 No.2, pp.158 - 176

Received: 01 Aug 2015
Accepted: 31 Aug 2015
Published online: 22 Oct 2015 *

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