Classic McEliece

Information-set decoding

The most important attack strategy against the one-wayness of the original McEliece cryptosystem is information-set decoding (ISD), which was introduced by Prange in 1962 and studied in the following papers:

Other attack strategies

The following papers study other ideas for attacking the one-wayness of the McEliece cryptosystem. Attack ideas that do not work against the cryptosystem are often presented as attacks against other cryptosystems.

Chosen-ciphertext attacks

Classic McEliece uses a transformation designed to convert a deterministic perfectly correct one-way PKE scheme into a perfectly correct KEM that resists chosen-ciphertext attacks. The following papers study the necessity and sufficiency of this transformation:

Further papers


Version: This is version 2024.03.27 of the "Papers" web page.