An algebraic approach for the resolution of algorithmic problems raised by cryptography and coding theory

Overview & Synopsis

First of all, during my PhD I focused on the public key cryptography, more exactly on the code-based cryptography. The main motivation is to study the security of the latest encryption schemes. For that, I analyzed in detail the structural properties of the main code families. Thus, my research was naturally directed to the study of the McEliece based encryption schemes, among which the latest MDCP based variant [MTSB13] and Polar codes variant [SK14]. In the case of the MDPC based variant, we manage to reveal an important weakness regarding the key pairs that are used in the protocol. Indeed, we proposed an efficient algorithm that retrieves the private key given the public key of the scheme. Next we counted the proportion of weak keys and we used the code equivalence problem to extend the number of weak keys. We published our results in an international conference in cryptography [BDLO16]. Next we studied the Polar codes and their application to public key cryptography.Since they were discovered by Arikan [Arı09], Polar codes are part of the most studied from an information theory point of view, family of codes. In terms of performance they are really efficient since they are capacity achieving over the Binary Discrete Memoryless Channels and they allow extremely fast encoding and decoding algorithms. Nonetheless, few facts are known about their structure. In this context, we have introduced an algebraic formalism which allowed us to reveal a big part of the structure of Polar codes. Indeed, we have managed to answer fundamental questions regarding Polar codes such as the dual, the minimum distance, the permutation group and the number of minimum weight codewords of a Polar code. Our results were published in an international conference in information theory [BDOT16]. We also managed to completely cryptanalyze the McEliece variant using Polar codes. The attack was a direct application of the aforementioned results on the structural properties of Polar codes and it was published in an international conference in postquantum cryptography [BCD+16].