On the Maximum Toroidal Distance Code for Lattice-Based Public-Key Cryptography

Abstract

We propose a maximum toroidal distance (MTD) code for lattice-based public-key encryption (PKE). By formulating the encryption encoding problem as the selection of $2^\ell$ points in the discrete $\ell$-dimensional torus $\mathbb{Z}_q^\ell$, the proposed construction maximizes the minimum $L_2$-norm toroidal distance to reduce the decryption failure rate (DFR) in post-quantum schemes such as the NIST ML-KEM (Crystals-Kyber). For $\ell = 2$, we show that the MTD code is essentially a variant of the Minal code recently introduced at IACR CHES 2025. For $\ell = 4$, we present a construction based on the $D_4$ lattice that achieves the largest known toroidal distance, while for $\ell = 8$, the MTD code corresponds to $2E_8$ lattice points in $\mathbb{Z}_4^8$. Numerical evaluations under the Kyber setting show that the proposed codes outperform both Minal and maximum Lee-distance ($L_1$-norm) codes in DFR for $\ell > 2$, while matching Minal code performance for $\ell = 2$.