McNie: A code-based public-key cryptosystem

Abstract

In this paper, we suggest a code-based public key encryption scheme, called McNie. McNie is a hybrid version of the McEliece and Niederreiter cryptosystems and its security is reduced to the hard problem of syndrome decoding. The public key involves a random generator matrix which is also used to mask the code used in the secret key. This makes the system safer against known structural attacks. In particular, we apply rank-metric codes to McNie.