Structural Properties of Twisted Reed-Solomon Codes with Applications to Cryptography

We present a generalisation of Twisted Reed-Solomon codes containing a new large class of MDS codes. We prove that the code class contains a large subfamily that is closed under duality. Furthermore, we study the Schur squares of the new codes and show that their dimension is often large. Using these structural properties, we single out a subfamily of the new codes which could be considered for code-based cryptography: These codes resist some existing structural attacks for Reed-Solomon-like codes, i.e. methods for retrieving the code parameters from an obfuscated generator matrix.Comment: 5 pages, accepted at: IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory 201

Twisted Reed-Solomon Codes

We present a new general construction of MDS codes over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$. We describe two explicit subclasses which contain new MDS codes of length at least $q/2$ for all values of $q \ge 11$. Moreover, we show that most of the new codes are not equivalent to a Reed-Solomon code.Comment: 5 pages, accepted at IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory 201