Inspired by Fujita's analysis [Quantum inf. & comput. 12(3&4), 2012], we suggest a twice-encryption scheme to improve the security of the original quantum McEliece public-key encryption algorithm.
This paper investigates a quantum version of McEliece public-key encryption (PKE) scheme, and analyzes its security. As is well known, the security of classical McEliece PKE is not stronger than the onewayness of related classical one-way function. We prove the security of quantum McEliece PKE ranks between them. Moreover, we propose the double-encryption technique to improve its security, and the security of the improved scheme is proved to be between the original scheme and the quantum one-time pad.
The McEliece cryptosystem is one of the best-known (classical) public-key cryptosystems, which is based on algebraic coding theory. In this paper, we present a quantum analogue of the classical McEliece cryptosystem. Our quantum McEliece public-key cryptosystem is based on the theory of stabilizer codes and has the key generation, encryption and decryption algorithms similar to those in the classical McEliece cryptosystem. We present an explicit construction of the quantum McEliece public-key cryptosystem using Calderbank-Shor-Steane codes based on generalized Reed-Solomon codes. We examine the security of our quantum McEliece cryptosystem and compare it with alternative systems.