Cryptanalysis of the Original McEliece Cryptosystem

Abstract
The class of public-key cryptosystems based on error-correcting codes is one of the few alternatives to the common algorithms based on number theory.We here present an attack against these systems which actually consists of a new probabilistic algorithm for finding minimum-weight words in any large linear code. This new attack notably points out that McEliece cipher with its original parameters does not provide a sufficient security level.