Practical attack breaks RLCE 128-bit PQC parameters

A practical full key-recovery attack has broken the 128-bit security parameters of RLCE, the code-based public-key scheme Yongge Wang submitted in the first round of NIST's post-quantum cryptography process.

Jacob Alperin-Sheriff reported the result on the NIST PQC forum and in IACR ePrint 2026/2716. He applied the GIJS attack recently discussed against Classic McEliece and found RLCE more susceptible, not less. Full private keys for the 128-bit parameter set fell in a few hours on a corporate laptop. He expects the remaining sets to fall at modest cloud cost.

Wang had noted that RLCE's parameters with weight equal to n minus k had not been broken and suggested they might resist GIJS. The new work overturns that claim for the concrete sets that mattered to the submission. RLCE did not advance in the NIST process, but the result closes a long-standing claim that those parameter choices remained sound and sharpens the comparison with Classic McEliece under the same attack family.