: The McEliece cryptosystem is one of the few systems to be considered secure against attacks by Quantum computers. The original scheme is built upon Goppa codes and produces very large keys, hence recent research has focused mainly on trying to reduce the public key size. Previous proposals tried to replace the class of Goppa codes with other families of codes, but this was revealed to be an insecure choice. In this paper we introduce a construction based on Generalized Srivastava codes, a large class which includes Goppa codes as a special case, that allows relatively short public keys without being vulnerable to known structural attacks.

This paper defines a new practical construction for a code-based signature scheme. We introduce a new protocol that is designed to follow the recent paradigm known as “Sigma protocol with helper”, and prove that the protocol’s security reduces directly to the Syndrome Decoding Problem. The protocol is then converted to a full-fledged signature scheme via a sequence of generic steps that include: removing the role of the helper; incorporating a variety of protocol optimizations (using e.g., Merkle trees); applying the Fiat–Shamir transformation. The resulting signature scheme is EUF-CMA secure in the QROM, with the following advantages: (a) Security relies on only minimal assumptions and is backed by a long-studied NP-complete problem; (b) the trusted setup structure allows for obtaining an arbitrarily small soundness error. This minimizes the required number of repetitions, thus alleviating a major bottleneck associated with Fiat–Shamir schemes. We outline an initial performance estimation to confirm that our scheme is competitive with respect to existing solutions of similar type.