A New Approximation Method for Constant Weight Coding and Its Hardware Implementation

Abstract

In this chapter, a more memory-efficient method for encoding binary information into words of prescribed length and weight is presented. The solutions in existing work include complex float point arithmetic or extra memory overhead which make it demanding for resource-constrained computing platform. The solution we propose here solves the problems above yet achieves better coding efficiency. We also correct a crucial error in previous implementations of code-based cryptography by exploiting and tweaking the proposed encoder. For the time being, the design presented in this work is the most compact one for any code-based encryption schemes. We show, for instance, that our lightweight implementation of Niederreiter encrypting unit can encrypt approximately 1 million plaintexts per second on a Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA, requiring 183 slices and 18 memory blocks