Attacking Code-Based Cryptosystems with Information Set Decoding Using Special-Purpose Hardware

In this work, we describe the first implementation of an information set decoding (ISD) attack against code-based cryptosystems like McEliece or Niederreiter using special-purpose hardware. We show that in contrast to other ISD attacks due to Lee and Brickel [7], Leon [8], Stern [15] and recently [9] (May et al) and [2] (Becket et al), reconfigurable hardware requires a different implementation and optimization approach: Proposed time-memory trade-off techniques are not possible in the desired parameter sets. We thus derive new parameter sets from all steps involved in the ISD attack, taking a near cycle-accurate runtime estimation as well as the communication overhead into account.