Abstract:
We study the McEliece cryptosystem with $u$-fold use of binary Reed–Muller codes
$\mathit{RM}(r,m)$. This modification of the McEliece cryptosystem
was proposed by V. M. Sidelnikov in 1994 and combines
high cryptographic security, transmission rate close to one,
and moderate complexity of both enciphering and deciphering.
For arbitrary values of the parameters $u$, $r$, and $m$
we give an upper bound for the cardinality of the set of public keys of this cryptosystem
and calculate its exact value in the case of $u=2$ and $r=1$.