How to Achieve a McEliece-Based Digital Signature Scheme
Abstract
McEliece is one of the oldest known public key cryptosystems. Though it was less widely studied that RSA, it is remarkable that all known attacks are still exponential. It is widely believed that McEliece does not allow practical digital signatures. In the present paper we disprove this belief and show several ways to build a practical signature scheme based on McEliece. The security is provably reduced in the random oracle model to the well-known \em syndrome decoding problem and the distinguishability of permuted binary Goppa codes from a random code. For example we are able to propose a scheme with signatures of 111-bits and a binary workfactor of $2^85$.