A Note on the Sidelnikov-Shestakov Attack of Niederreiter Scheme

The terminology “code based public-key cryptosystem” means that the algorithmic primitives of such public-key cryptosystems use error correcting codes. In papers [1, 2] methods of building such public-key cryptosystems have been suggested. The Niederreiter’s public-key cryptosystem [2] based on q-ary generalized Reed-Solomon codes was proposed in 1986, Sidelnikov and Shestakov [3] presented an attack on this public-key cryptosystem in 1992, showing its insecurity. By examining the attack algorithm, we note that one can change some redundant procedures to simplify the algorithm.