  In this paper we present a new class of convolutional codes that admits an
efficient al- gebraic decoding algorithm. We study some of its properties and
show that it can decode interesting sequences of errors patterns. The second
part of the paper is devoted to in- vestigate its use in a variant of the
McEliece cryptosystem. In contrast to the classical McEliece cryptosystems,
where block codes are used, we propose the use of a convolu- tional encoder to
be part of the public key. In this setting the message is a sequence of
messages instead of a single block message and the errors are added randomly
throughout the sequence. We conclude the paper providing some comments on the
security. Although there is no obvious security threats to this new scheme, we
point out several possible adaptations of existing attacks and discuss the
difficulties of such attacks to succeed in breaking this cryptosystem.
