International Association
for Cryptologic Research

This paper presents two modifications for Loidreau’s code-based cryptosystem. Loidreau’s cryptosystem is a rank metric code-based cryptosystem constructed by using Gabidulin codes in the McEliece setting. Recently a polynomial-time key recovery attack was proposed to break Loidreau’s cryptosystem in some cases. To prevent this attack, we propose the use of subcodes to disguise the secret codes in Modification I. In Modification II, we choose a random matrix of low column rank over F q to mix with the secret matrix. According to our analysis, these two modifications can both resist the existing structural attacks. Additionally, we adopt the systematic generator matrix of the public code to make a reduction in the public-key size. In additon to stronger resistance against structural attacks and more compact representation of public keys, our modifications also have larger information transmission rates.