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 80 bits security parameters in
a few seconds.Comment: To appear in Designs, Codes and Cryptography Journa
