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

Re-proving Channel Polarization Theorems: An Extremality and Robustness Analysis

The general subject considered in this thesis is a recently discovered coding technique, polar coding, which is used to construct a class of error correction codes with unique properties. In his ground-breaking work, Ar{\i}kan proved that this class of codes, called polar codes, achieve the symmetric capacity --- the mutual information evaluated at the uniform input distribution ---of any stationary binary discrete memoryless channel with low complexity encoders and decoders requiring in the order of $O(N\log N)$ operations in the block-length $N$. This discovery settled the long standing open problem left by Shannon of finding low complexity codes achieving the channel capacity. Polar coding settled an open problem in information theory, yet opened plenty of challenging problems that need to be addressed. A significant part of this thesis is dedicated to advancing the knowledge about this technique in two directions. The first one provides a better understanding of polar coding by generalizing some of the existing results and discussing their implications, and the second one studies the robustness of the theory over communication models introducing various forms of uncertainty or variations into the probabilistic model of the channel.Comment: Preview of my PhD Thesis, EPFL, Lausanne, 2014. For the full version, see http://people.epfl.ch/mine.alsan/publication

A Hardware Implementation for Code-based Post-quantum Asymmetric Cryptography

This paper presents a dedicated hardware implementation of the LEDAcrypt cryptosystem, which uses Quasi-Cyclic Low-Density Parity-Check codes and the Q decoder for the decryption function. The designed architecture is synthesized for both FPGA and ASIC technologies, featuring an intrinsic scalability over a wide range of parallelism degrees, which makes it possible to target multiple application scenarios, with different trade-offs between decryption latency and implementation complexity. The proposed system achieves a large speed-up over both software execution and a previous hardware implementation, with a the decryption latency as low as 3.16 ms for the FPGA version, and 1.2 ms when synthesized for a 65 nm CMOS technology

Algebraic Codes For Error Correction In Digital Communication Systems

Access to the full-text thesis is no longer available at the author's request, due to 3rd party copyright restrictions. Access removed on 29.11.2016 by CS (TIS).Metadata merged with duplicate record (http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/899) on 20.12.2016 by CS (TIS).C. Shannon presented theoretical conditions under which communication was possible error-free in the presence of noise. Subsequently the notion of using error correcting codes to mitigate the effects of noise in digital transmission was introduced by R. Hamming. Algebraic codes, codes described using powerful tools from algebra took to the fore early on in the search for good error correcting codes. Many classes of algebraic codes now exist and are known to have the best properties of any known classes of codes. An error correcting code can be described by three of its most important properties length, dimension and minimum distance. Given codes with the same length and dimension, one with the largest minimum distance will provide better error correction. As a result the research focuses on finding improved codes with better minimum distances than any known codes. Algebraic geometry codes are obtained from curves. They are a culmination of years of research into algebraic codes and generalise most known algebraic codes. Additionally they have exceptional distance properties as their lengths become arbitrarily large. Algebraic geometry codes are studied in great detail with special attention given to their construction and decoding. The practical performance of these codes is evaluated and compared with previously known codes in different communication channels. Furthermore many new codes that have better minimum distance to the best known codes with the same length and dimension are presented from a generalised construction of algebraic geometry codes. Goppa codes are also an important class of algebraic codes. A construction of binary extended Goppa codes is generalised to codes with nonbinary alphabets and as a result many new codes are found. This construction is shown as an efficient way to extend another well known class of algebraic codes, BCH codes. A generic method of shortening codes whilst increasing the minimum distance is generalised. An analysis of this method reveals a close relationship with methods of extending codes. Some new codes from Goppa codes are found by exploiting this relationship. Finally an extension method for BCH codes is presented and this method is shown be as good as a well known method of extension in certain cases