International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Polar codes are provably capacity achieving linear block codes. The generator matrix of these codes is specified by knowing the parameters of transmission channel, length and dimension of the used code. On the other hand, for the cryptosystems based on general decoding problem (i.e. code based cryptosystems), the generator matrix of the applied code should be properly hidden from the attacker. Moreover, in the computational security, it is assumed that an attacker with restricted processing power has unlimited access to transmission media. Thus, an attacker can construct the generator matrix of polar codes, especially for Binary Erasure Channel on which this matrix can be efficiently specified.

In this paper, we introduce a novel method to hide the generator matrix of polar codes in such a way that an attacker cannot construct it in polynomial time even by knowledge of the channel parameters, dimension and length of the used code. By the help of this method, a secret key cryptosystem based on non-systematic polar codes over Binary Erasure Channel is proposed which provides both data security and reliability in one process simultaneously. In fact, the main goal of this research is to achieve the acceptable level of security and reliability by taking advantage of the interesting properties of polar codes. The proposed scheme resists against the typical attacks on the cryptosystems based on error correcting codes. Also, by employing some efficient methods, the key length of our scheme is decreased compared to Rao-Nam secret key cryptosystem. Moreover, our scheme benefits from high code rate, proper error performance, faster processing and efficient implementation.