5 research outputs found
Polynomial-Time Key Recovery Attack on the Faure-Loidreau Scheme based on Gabidulin Codes
Encryption schemes based on the rank metric lead to small public key sizes of
order of few thousands bytes which represents a very attractive feature
compared to Hamming metric-based encryption schemes where public key sizes are
of order of hundreds of thousands bytes even with additional structures like
the cyclicity. The main tool for building public key encryption schemes in rank
metric is the McEliece encryption setting used with the family of Gabidulin
codes. Since the original scheme proposed in 1991 by Gabidulin, Paramonov and
Tretjakov, many systems have been proposed based on different masking
techniques for Gabidulin codes. Nevertheless, over the years all these systems
were attacked essentially by the use of an attack proposed by Overbeck.
In 2005 Faure and Loidreau designed a rank-metric encryption scheme which was
not in the McEliece setting. The scheme is very efficient, with small public
keys of size a few kiloBytes and with security closely related to the
linearized polynomial reconstruction problem which corresponds to the decoding
problem of Gabidulin codes. The structure of the scheme differs considerably
from the classical McEliece setting and until our work, the scheme had never
been attacked. We show in this article that this scheme like other schemes
based on Gabidulin codes, is also vulnerable to a polynomial-time attack that
recovers the private key by applying Overbeck's attack on an appropriate public
code. As an example we break concrete proposed bits security parameters in
a few seconds.Comment: To appear in Designs, Codes and Cryptography Journa
Security of the GPT cryptosystem and its applications to cryptography
The public key cryptosystem (PKC) based on rank error correcting codes (the GPT cryptosystem) was proposed in 1991. Use of rank codes in cryptographic applications is advantageous since it is practically impossible to utilize combinatoric decoding. This enabled using public keys of a smaller size. Several attacks against this system were published, including Gibson's attacks and more recently Overbeck's attacks. A few modifications were proposed withstanding Gibson's attack but at least one of them was broken by the stronger attacks by Overbeck. A tool to prevent Overbeck's attack is presented by Gabidulin, which makes the cryptographer define a proper column scrambler matrix over the extension field without violating the standard mode of GPT cryptosystem. In this paper, we apply this tool to another variant of the GPT cryptosystem. Furthermore we increase the security of the proposed system against all known attacks and reduce the public key size to 4 Kbits instead of 10 Kbits