The maximum-likelihood decoding problem is known to be NP-hard for general
linear and Reed-Solomon codes. In this paper, we introduce the notion of
A-covered codes, that is, codes that can be decoded through a polynomial time
algorithm A whose decoding bound is beyond the covering radius. For these
codes, we show that the maximum-likelihood decoding problem is reachable in
polynomial time in the code parameters. Focusing on bi- nary BCH codes, we were
able to find several examples of A-covered codes, including two codes for which
the maximum-likelihood decoding problem can be solved in quasi-quadratic time.Comment: in Yet Another Conference on Cryptography, Porquerolle : France
(2010