Cryptanalysis of Two McEliece Cryptosystems Based on Quasi-Cyclic Codes

Abstract

We cryptanalyse here two variants of the McEliece cryptosystem based on quasi-cyclic codes. Both aim at reducing the key size by restricting the public and secret generator matrices to be in quasi-cyclic form. The first variant considers subcodes of a primitive BCH code. We prove that this variant is not secure by finding and solving a linear system satisfied by the entries of the secret permutation matrix. The other variant uses quasi-cyclic low density parity-check codes. This scheme was devised to be immune against general attacks working for McEliece type cryptosystems based on low density parity-check codes by choosing in the McEliece scheme more general one-to-one mappings than permutation matrices. We suggest here a structural attack exploiting the quasi-cyclic structure of the code and a certain weakness in the choice of the linear transformations that hide the generator matrix of the code. Our analysis shows that with high probability a parity-check matrix of a punctured version of the secret code can be recovered in cubic time complexity in its length. The complete reconstruction of the secret parity-check matrix of the quasi-cyclic low density parity-check codes requires the search of codewords of low weight which can be done with about $2^{37}$ operations for the specific parameters proposed.