McEliece proposed a public-key cryptosystem based on error-correcting codes, in particular binary classical Goppa codes. Actually his scheme needs only a class of codes with a good decoding algorithm and with a huge number of inequivalent members with given parameters. In this work, we studied the known attacks on McEliece’s scheme and discussed the security of the scheme against these attacks.
 

Key words : Public key cryptography., error-correcting codes, cryptanalysis.