Compact McEliece keys based on quasi-dyadic Srivastava codes

The McEliece cryptosystem is one of the few systems to be considered secure against attacks by Quantum computers. The original scheme is built upon Goppa codes and produces very large keys, hence recent research has focused mainly on trying to reduce the public key size. Previous proposals tried to replace the class of Goppa codes with other families of codes, but this was revealed to be an insecure choice. In this paper we introduce a construction based on Generalized Srivastava codes, a large class which includes Goppa codes as a special case, that allows relatively short public keys without being vulnerable to known structural attacks. © de Gruyter 2012.