ON THE PROPERTIES AND COMPLEXITY OF MULTICOVERING RADII

People rely on the ability to transmit information over channels of communication that aresubject to noise and interference. This makes the ability to detect and recover from errorsextremely important. Coding theory addresses this need for reliability. A fundamentalquestion of coding theory is whether and how we can correct the errors in a message thathas been subjected to interference. One answer comes from structures known as errorcorrecting codes.A well studied parameter associated with a code is its covering radius. The coveringradius of a code is the smallest radius such that every vector in the Hamming space of thecode is contained in a ball of that radius centered around some codeword. Covering radiusrelates to an important decoding strategy known as nearest neighbor decoding.The multicovering radius is a generalization of the covering radius that was proposed byKlapper [11] in the course of studying stream ciphers. In this work we develop techniques forfinding the multicovering radius of specific codes. In particular, we study the even weightcode, the 2-error correcting BCH code, and linear codes with covering radius one.We also study questions involving the complexity of finding the multicovering radius ofcodes. We show: Lower bounding the m-covering radius of an arbitrary binary code is NPcompletewhen m is polynomial in the length of the code. Lower bounding the m-coveringradius of a linear code is Σp2-complete when m is polynomial in the length of the code. IfP is not equal to NP, then the m-covering radius of an arbitrary binary code cannot beapproximated within a constant factor or within a factor nϵ, where n is the length of thecode and ϵ andlt; 1, in polynomial time. Note that the case when m = 1 was also previouslyunknown. If NP is not equal to Σp2, then the m-covering radius of a linear code cannot beapproximated within a constant factor or within a factor nϵ, where n is the length of thecode and ϵ andlt; 1, in polynomial time

and A.Klapper, Bounds for the Multicovering Radii of Reed-Muller Codes with Applications to Stream Ciphers, to appear, Designs, Codes, and Cryptography

Abstract. The multicovering radii of a code are recent generalizations of the covering radius of a code. For positive m, the m-covering radius of C is the least radius t such that every m-tuple of vectors is contained in at least one ball of radius t centered at some codeword. In this paper upper bounds are found for the multicovering radii of first order Reed-Muller codes. These bounds generalize the well-known Norse bounds for the classical covering radii of first order Reed-Muller codes. They are exact in some cases. These bounds are then used to prove the existence of secure families of keystreams against a general class of cryptanalytic attacks. This solves the open question that gave rise to the study of multicovering radii of codes. Keywords: Error correcting code, stream cipher, covering radius, Reed-Muller code. 1