A new efficient way based on special stabilizer multiplier permutations to attack the hardness of the minimum weight search problem for large BCH codes

BCH codes represent an important class of cyclic error-correcting codes; their minimum distances are known only for some cases and remains an open NP-Hard problem in coding theory especially for large lengths. This paper presents an efficient scheme ZSSMP (Zimmermann Special Stabilizer Multiplier Permutation) to find the true value of the minimum distance for many large BCH codes. The proposed method consists in searching a codeword having the minimum weight by Zimmermann algorithm in the sub codes fixed by special stabilizer multiplier permutations. These few sub codes had very small dimensions compared to the dimension of the considered code itself and therefore the search of a codeword of global minimum weight is simplified in terms of run time complexity. ZSSMP is validated on all BCH codes of length 255 for which it gives the exact value of the minimum distance. For BCH codes of length 511, the proposed technique passes considerably the famous known powerful scheme of Canteaut and Chabaud used to attack the public-key cryptosystems based on codes. ZSSMP is very rapid and allows catching the smallest weight codewords in few seconds. By exploiting the efficiency and the quickness of ZSSMP, the true minimum distances and consequently the error correcting capability of all the set of 165 BCH codes of length up to 1023 are determined except the two cases of the BCH(511,148) and BCH(511,259) codes. The comparison of ZSSMP with other powerful methods proves its quality for attacking the hardness of minimum weight search problem at least for the codes studied in this paper.