Extending Gibson's attacks on the GPT cryptosystem

Abstract

In this paper we look at the Gabidulin version of the McEliece cryptosystem (GPT). In order to avoid Gibson's attacks on GPT, several variants have been proposed. We cryptanalyze the variant with column scrambler and the one using reducible rank codes. Employing Gibson's attacks as a black box, we get an efficient attack for the parameter sets proposed for GPT with column scrambler. As a countermeasure to our attack, we propose a new variant of the GPT cryptosystem. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.