A CCA2 Secure Variant of the McEliece Cryptosystem

The McEliece public-key encryption scheme has become an interesting alternative to cryptosystems based on number-theoretical problems. Different from RSA and ElGamal, McEliece PKC is not known to be broken by a quantum computer. Moreover, even though McEliece PKC has a relatively big key size, encryption and decryption operations are rather efficient. In spite of all the recent results in coding-theory-based cryptosystems, to the date, there are no constructions secure against chosen cipher-text attacks in the standard model-the de facto security notion for public-key cryptosystems. In this paper, we show the first construction of a McEliece-based public-key cryptosystem secure against chosen ciphertext attacks in the standard model. Our construction is inspired by a recently proposed technique by Rosen and Segev.