International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Digital signatures ensure legitimate access through identity authentication. It is also used to build blocks in blockchains and to authenticate transactions. The Courtois-Finiasz-Sendrier (CFS) digital signature is a well-known code-based digital signature scheme based on the Niederreiter cryptosystem. The CFS signature, however, is not widely used due to the long processing time required by its signing algorithm. Most code-based digital signature schemes are based on Niederreiter. The present paper proposes a new code-based digital signature based on the McEliece cryptosystem. The proposed McEliece code-based scheme also gives less complexity and a higher success rate. The scheme provides an efficient code-based algorithm to sign a document in a shorter processing time. The scheme is also secure against public key structural attacks. Key generation, signing, and verification algorithms are presented. The key generation algorithm constructs three-tuple public keys using a dual inverse matrix. The proposed signing scheme is the first code-based digital signature based on McEliece with the lower processing time required to construct a valid digital signature. The proposed signing algorithm also constructs smaller signatures. In addition, the verification algorithm checks the integrity value to avoid any forgery before final verification.