Public-Key Cryptosystems and Bounded Distance Decoding of Linear Codes

Error-correcting codes form an important topic in information theory. They are used to correct errors that occur during transmission on a noisy channel. An important method for correcting errors is bounded distance decoding. The public-key cryptosystem is a cryptographic protocol that has two different keys. One of them is a public-key that can be known by everyone, and the other is the private-key only known to the user of the system. The data encrypted with the public-key of a given user can only be decrypted by this user with his or her private-key. In this paper, we propose a public-key cryptosystem based on the error-correcting codes. The decryption is performed by using the bounded distance decoding of the code. For a given code length, dimension, and error-correcting capacity, the new system allows dealing with larger plaintext than other code based public-key cryptosystems.