A Decoder for a Lightweight McEliece Cryptosystem Based on Concatenated Codes

Large-scale quantum computers threaten the security of today's public-key cryptography. The McEliece cryptosystem is one of the most promising candidates for postquantum cryptography. However, the McEliece system has the drawback of large key sizes for the public key. Similar to other public-key cryptosystems, the McEliece system has a comparably high computational complexity. Embedded devices often lack the required computational resources to compute those systems with sufficiently low latency. Hence, those systems require hardware acceleration. Lately, a generalized concatenated code construction was proposed together with a restrictive channel model, which allows for much smaller public keys for comparable security levels. In this work, we propose a hardware decoder suitable for a McEliece system based on these generalized concatenated codes. The results show that those systems are suitable for resource-constrained embedded devices.

Automated summary

Large-scale quantum computers pose a threat to the security of current public-key cryptography. The McEliece cryptosystem is a promising candidate for postquantum cryptography, but it has the drawback of large key sizes and high computational complexity. Hardware acceleration is required for efficient computation on resource-constrained devices. A proposed hardware decoder based on generalized concatenated codes shows that these systems are suitable for embedded devices.