On Hermitian LCD codes from cyclic codes and their applications to orthogonal direct sum masking

Abstract: Cyclic codes are an interesting type of linear codes and have wide applications in communication and storage systems due to their efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. It was proved that asymptotically good Hermitian LCD codes exist. The objective of this paper is to construct some cyclic Hermitian LCD codes over finite fields and analyse their parameters. The dimensions of these codes are settled and the lower bounds on their minimum distances are presented. Most Hermitian LCD codes presented in this paper are not BCH codes. In addition, we employ Hermitian LCD codes to propose a Hermitian orthogonal direct sum masking scheme that achieves protection against fault injection attacks. It is shown that the codes with great minimum distances are desired to improve the resistance.