Integer Syndrome Decoding in the Presence of Noise

Code-based cryptography received attention after the NIST started the post-quantum cryptography standardization process in 2016. A central NP-hard problem is the binary syndrome decoding problem, on which the security of many code-based cryptosystems lies. The best known methods to solve this problem all stem from the information-set decoding strategy. A recent line of work considers augmented versions of this strategy, with hints provided by side-channel information. In this work, we consider the integer syndrome decoding problem, where the integer syndrome is available but might be noisy. We study how the performance of the decoder is affected by the noise. We provide experimental results on cryptographic parameters for the Classic McEliece and BIKE cryptosystems, which are in the fourth round of the NIST standardization process.