Smaller keys for McEliece cryptosystems using convolutional encoders

  1. Sebastião, Cláudia Maria Ferreira
Dirigida por:
  1. Paulo José Fernandes Almeida Codirector/a
  2. Diego Napp Avelli Codirector

Universidad de defensa: Universidade de Aveiro (UA)

Fecha de defensa: 27 de enero de 2022

Tribunal:
  1. António José Arsénia Nogueira Presidente/a
  2. Rita Simões Vocal
  3. António Machiavelo Vocal
  4. Verónica Requena Arévalo Vocal
  5. Joan-Josep Climent Coloma Vocal

Tipo: Tesis

Resumen

The arrival of the quantum computing era is a real threat to the confidentiality and integrity of digital communications. So, it is urgent to develop alternative cryptographic techniques that are resilient to quantum computing. This is the goal of pos-quantum cryptography. The code-based cryptosystem called Classical McEliece Cryptosystem remains one of the most promising postquantum alternatives. However, the main drawback of this system is that the public key is much larger than in the other alternatives. In this thesis we study the algebraic properties of this type of cryptosystems and present a new variant that uses a convolutional encoder to mask the so-called Generalized Reed- Solomon code. We conduct a cryptanalysis of this new variant to show that high levels of security can be achieved using significant smaller keys than in the existing variants of the McEliece scheme. We illustrate the advantages of the proposed cryptosystem by presenting several practical examples.