Cryptanalysis of the Wu–Dawson Public Key Cryptosystem

A new public key cryptosystem was introduced by Wu and Dawson at the Fourth International Conference on Finite Fields (Fq4). This scheme is similar to the McEliece public key cryptosystem, in the sense that it also can be described in terms of linear error-correcting codes over finite fields. However, in contrast to the McEliece scheme, the security of the Wu–Dawson system is not based on a decoding problem which is assumed to be intractable but on the theory of generalized inverses of matrices over finite fields. The authors compare their scheme with the McEliece scheme and claim that the same level of security can be obtained using smaller codes, therefore reducing the key size. In this note it will be shown that the Wu–Dawson scheme is insecure, i.e., a trapdoor can be computed efficiently from the knowledge of the public key.