2010/01/14 by Bruno Kindarji, Kindarji, Bruno, Gérard Cohen +3
Computer Science · Engineering · #Coding theory and cryptography #Cryptography and Data Security #Discrete Mathematics (cs.DM) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #graph theory and CDMA systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1001.2463
openalex publication_date 2010/01/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Starting from a practical use of Reed-Solomon codes in a cryptographic scheme published in Indocrypt'09, this paper deals with the threshold of linear q-ary error-correcting codes. The security of this scheme is based on the intractability of polynomial reconstruction when there is too much noise in the vector. Our approach switches from this paradigm to an Information Theoretical point of view: is there a class of elements that are so far away from the code that the list size is always superpolynomial? Or, dually speaking, is Maximum-Likelihood decoding almost surely impossible? We relate this issue to the decoding threshold of a code, and show that when the minimal distance of the code is high enough, the threshold effect is very sharp. In a second part, we explicit lower-bounds on the threshold of Maximum-Distance Separable codes such as Reed-Solomon codes, and compute the threshold for the toy example that motivates this study.