HQC decryption with soft-decision RS decoder

[Zhang, Xinmiao]

Dear all,

As you know, the decryption of HQC mainly consists of concatenated Reed-Muller (RM) and Reed-Solomon (RS) decoding. 

Recently, we utilized the intermediate results of RM decoding to generate soft inputs to RS decoding. Soft-decision RS decoders can use much shorter codeword length to achieve the same decoding failure rate as the hard-decision decoder considered previously. For example, the RS codeword length and accordingly the key length of HQC for 128-bit security can be reduced by 22% by using the Generalized minimum distance (GMD) soft-decision RS decoder.  

Our paper on this work can be found in arXiv as follows. Your comments or feedback are welcome.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20156

Thanks,

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Xinmiao Zhang
IEEE Fellow
Associate EiC, TCAS-I, 2024-2027
Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Translational Data Analytics Institute
Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology
The Ohio State University
205 Dreese Laboratories
2015 Neil Ave.
Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA
Email: zhang...@osu.edu
website: https://ece.osu.edu/vlsiarc
---------------------------------------------------------------------