Revista de Engenharia da Computação e Tecnologia da Informação

A McEliece Cryptosystem for Securing Cloud Data

Henry Chima Ukwuoma* , Arome Gabriel, Aderonke Thompson and Boniface K Alese

With the evolvement of quantum computers, most cryptosystems will be rendered susceptible to attack and obsolete since, the safety and security of some cryptosystems is subject to the hardness of the integer factorization problem and discrete logarithm problem. This paper reviews the code-based cryptography (McEliece cryptosystem) and proposes a variant of the McEliece cryptosystem for data security in the cloud. The research simulates the proposed variant alongside other cryptosystems to determine the execution time in terms of key generation, encryption and decryption processes, and with a view to present the pros and cons of the proposed cryptosystem. A variant of McEliece cryptosystem is proposed with a goal to enhance the security of the cryptosystem that can resist attack amidst classical and quantum computing. The simulation revealed that the proposed McEliece cryptosystem has a better time complexity compared to the existing McEliece cryptosystem. The novel distortion of the parameters S and P also strengthens the security of the proposed system.