high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

The linear code based McEliece cryptosystem is potentially promising as a so-called "post-quantum" public key cryptosystem because thus far it has resisted quantum cryptanalysis, but to be considered secure, the cryptosystem must resist other attacks as well. In 2011, Bernstein et al. introduced the "Ball Collision Decoding" (BCD) attack on McEliece which is a significant improvement in asymptotic complexity over the previous best known attack. We implement this attack on GPUs, which offer a parallel architecture that is well-suited to the matrix operations used in the attack and decrease the asymptotic run-time. Our implementation executes the attack more than twice as fast as the reference implementation and could be used for a practical attack on the original McEliece parameters.