Paper 2026/2476 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2026/2476 ↗

On the Hardness of Finding Permutation Automorphisms of Linear Codes

Abstract

We study the hardness of finding permutation automorphisms of linear codes. We look into three main problems: $\mathsf{AUT}$, $\mathsf{AUT}$-$\mathsf{Gen}$ and $\mathsf{AUT}$-$\mathsf{Count}$ which, respectively, ask to find a non-trivial automorphism, a generating set and the order of the automorphism group. We give polynomial time reductions from $\mathsf{AUT}$ to $\mathsf{ISO}$ (the problem of finding a permutation isomorphism between two linear codes), and from $\mathsf{ISO}$ to $\mathsf{AUT}$-$\mathsf{Gen}$ and $\mathsf{AUT}$-$\mathsf{Count}$. This shows that $\mathsf{AUT}$-$\mathsf{Gen}$ and $\mathsf{AUT}$-$\mathsf{Count}$ are unlikely to be easy in the worst case, since all known solvers for $\mathsf{ISO}$ take exponential time if the hull dimension (the subspace given by the intersection between the code and its dual) is large enough. Furthermore, we give a reduction from $\mathsf{AUT}$-$\mathsf{Gen}$ to the problem of finding generators for the automorphism group of a graph, which we refer to as $\mathsf{GraphAUT}$-$\mathsf{Gen}$. Up to some polynomial factors, the reduction runs in time $O(n^{h})$, with $n$ being the code length and $h$ the hull dimension: for $h = O\big(\log(n)\big)$, this implies that $\mathsf{AUT}$-$\mathsf{Gen}$ can be solved in worst case quasi-polynomial time. We also give a simpler version of the reduction, running in time which is exponential in the worst case (arguably, only for rather contrived codes), even for small $h$. However, heuristically, the algorithm is on average extremely efficient for small $h$. We use it as a concrete solver and show that a proof-of-concept implementation is significantly faster than the built-in implementations of Leon's and Feulner's algorithms provided by $\texttt{Magma}$ and $\texttt{Sagemath}$.