Improved code-based identification scheme

We revisit the 3-pass code-based identification scheme proposed by Stern at Crypto’93, and give a new 5-pass protocol for which the probability of the cheater is ≈ 1/2 (instead of 2/3 in the original Stern’s proposal). Furthermore, we propose to use quasi-cyclic construction in order to dramatically reduce the size of the public key. The proposed scheme is zero-knowledge and relies on an NPcomplete problem coming from coding theory (namely the q-ary Syndrome Decoding problem). Taking into account a recent study of a generalization of Stern’s information-set-decoding algorithm for decoding linear codes over arbitrary finite fields Fq, we suggest parameters so that the public key be 34Kbits while those of Stern’s scheme is about 66Kbits. This provides a very practical identification (and possibly signature) scheme which is mostly attractive for light-weight cryptography.