Understanding the maximum size of a code with a given minimum distance is a major question in computer science and discrete mathematics. The most fruitful approach for finding asymptotic bounds on such codes is by using Delsarte’s theory of association schemes. With this approach, Delsarte constructs a linear program such that its maximum value is an upper bound on the maximum size of a code with a given minimum distance. Bounding this value can be done by finding solutions to the corresponding dual linear program. Delsarte’s theory is very general and goes way beyond binary codes. In this work, we provide universal bounds in the framework of association schemes that generalize the Elias-Bassalygo bound, which can be applied to any association scheme constructed from a distance function. These bounds are obtained by constructing new solutions to Delsarte’s dual linear program. We instantiate these results and we recover known bounds for q-ary codes and for constant-weight binary codes. Our other contribution is to recover, for essentially any Q-polynomial scheme, MRRW-type solutions to Delsarte’s dual linear program which are inspired by the Laplacian approach of Friedman and Tillich instead of using the Christoffel-Darboux formulas. We show in particular how the second linear programming bound can be interpreted in this framework.

Enhanced pqsigRM is a code-based hash-and-sign scheme proposed to the second National Institute of Standards and Technology call for post-quantum signatures. The scheme is based on the (U, U + V) -construction and it enjoys remarkably small signature lengths, about 1KBytes for a security level of 128 bits. Unfortunately we will show that signatures leak information about the underlying (U, U + V) -structure. It allows to retrieve the private-key with 100, 000 signatures.

The Learning With Errors (LWE) problem asks to find ‍s from an input of the form (A, b = As+e) ∈ (ℤ/qℤ)m × n × (ℤ/qℤ)m, for a vector ‍e that has small-magnitude entries. In this work, we do not focus on solving ‍LWE but on the task of sampling instances. As these are extremely sparse in their range, it may seem plausible that the only way to proceed is to first create ‍s and ‍e and then set ‍b = As+e. In particular, such an instance sampler knows the solution. This raises the question whether it is possible to obliviously sample (A, As+e), namely, without knowing the underlying ‍s. A variant of the assumption that oblivious ‍LWE sampling is hard has been used in a series of works to analyze the security of candidate constructions of Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (SNARKs). As the assumption is related to ‍LWE, these SNARKs have been conjectured to be secure in the presence of quantum adversaries.

We give a quantum reduction from finding short codewords in a random linear code to decoding for the Hamming metric. This is the first time such a reduction (classical or quantum) has been obtained. Our reduction adapts to linear codes the Stehlé-Steinfield-Tanaka-Xagawa’ re-interpretation of Regev’s quantum reduction from finding short lattice vectors to solving the Closest Vector Problem. The Hamming metric is a much coarser metric than the Euclidean metric and this adaptation has needed several new ingredients to make it work. For instance, in order to have a meaningful reduction it is necessary in the Hamming metric to choose a very large decoding radius and this needs in many cases to go beyond the radius where decoding is always unique. Another crucial step for the analysis of the reduction is the choice of the errors that are being fed to the decoding algorithm. For lattices, errors are usually sampled according to a Gaussian distribution. However, it turns out that the Bernoulli distribution (the analogue for codes of the Gaussian) is too much spread out and cannot be used, as such, for the reduction with codes. This problem was solved by using instead a truncated Bernoulli distribution.

In this article we revisit smoothing bounds in parallel between lattices and codes. Initially introduced by Micciancio and Regev, these bounds were instantiated with Gaussian distributions and were crucial for arguing the security of many lattice-based cryptosystems. Unencumbered by direct application concerns, we provide a systematic study of how these bounds are obtained for both lattices and codes, transferring techniques between both areas. We also consider multiple choices of spherically symmetric noise distributions. We found that the best strategy for a worst-case bound combines Parseval’s Identity, the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, and the second linear programming bound, and this holds for both codes and lattices and all noise distributions at hand. For an average-case analysis, the linear programming bound can be replaced by an expected value computation. This alone gives optimal results for spherically uniform noise over random codes and random lattices. This also improves prior Gaussian smoothing bounds for worst-case lattices, but surprisingly this provides even better results with uniform ball noise than for Gaussian (or Bernoulli noise for codes). This counterintuitive situation can be resolved by adequate decomposition and truncation of Gaussian and Bernoulli distributions into a superposition of uniform noise, giving further improvement for those cases, and putting them on par with the uniform cases.

In this article, we propose an adaptation of the algorithmic reduction theory of lattices to binary codes. This includes the celebrated LLL algorithm (Lenstra, Lenstra, Lovasz, 1982), as well as adaptations of associated algorithms such as the Nearest Plane Algorithm of Babai (1986). Interestingly, the adaptation of LLL to binary codes can be interpreted as an algorithmic version of the bound of Griesmer (1960) on the minimal distance of a code. Using these algorithms, we demonstrate—both with a heuristic analysis and in practice—a small polynomial speed-up over the Information-Set Decoding algorithm of Lee and Brickell (1988) for random binary codes. This appears to be the first such speed-up that is not based on a time-memory trade-off. The above speed-up should be read as a very preliminary example of the potential of a reduction theory for codes, for example in cryptanalysis.

The security of code-based cryptography relies primarily on the hardness of generic decoding with linear codes. The best generic decoding algorithms are all improvements of an old algorithm due to Prange: they are known under the name of information set decoding techniques (ISD). A while ago a generic decoding algorithm which does not belong to this family was proposed: statistical decoding. It is a randomized algorithm that requires the computation of a large set of parity-check equations of moderate weight. We solve here several open problems related to this decoding algorithm. We give in particular the asymptotic complexity of this algorithm, give a rather efficient way of computing the parity-check equations needed for it inspired by ISD techniques and give a lower bound on its complexity showing that when it comes to decoding on the Gilbert-Varshamov bound it can never be better than Prange's algorithm.