Irene Márquez-Corbella

Irene Márquez-Corbella, Jean-Pierre Tillich

In this paper we present a modification of Reed-Solomon codes that beats the Guruwami-Sudan $1-\sqrt{R}$ decoding radius of Reed-Solomon codes at low rates $R$. The idea is to choose Reed-Solomon codes $U$ and $V$ with appropriate rates in a $\left( U\mid U+V\right)$ construction and to decode them with the Koetter-Vardy soft information decoder. We suggest to use a slightly more general version of these codes (but which has the same decoding performances as the $\left( U\mid U+V\right)$-construction) for code-based cryptography, namely to build a McEliece scheme. The point is here that these codes not only perform nearly as well (or even better in the low rate regime) as Reed-Solomon codes, their structure seems to avoid the Sidelnikov-Shestakov attack which broke a previous McEliece proposal based on generalized Reed-Solomon codes.

Alain Couvreur, Irene Márquez-Corbella, Ruud Pellikaan

We give a polynomial time attack on the McEliece public key cryptosystem based on subcodes of algebraic geometry (AG) codes. The proposed attack reposes on the distinguishability of such codes from random codes using the Schur product. Wieschebrink treated the genus zero case a few years ago but his approach cannot be extent straightforwardly to other genera. We address this problem by introducing and using a new notion, which we call the t-closure of a code.