Cyclic redundancy check

A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is an error-detecting code commonly used in digital networks and storage devices to detect accidental changes to raw data. Blocks of data entering these systems get a short check value attached, based on the remainder of a polynomial division of their contents. On retrieval, the calculation is repeated and, in the event the check values do not match, corrective action can be taken against data corruption. CRCs can be used for error correction (see bitfilters). CRCs are so called because the check (data verification) value is a redundancy (it expands the message without adding information) and the algorithm is based on cyclic codes. CRCs are popular because they are simple to implement in binary hardware, easy to analyze mathematically, and particularly good at detecting common errors caused by noise in transmission channels. Because the check value has a fixed length, the function that generates it is occasionally used as a hash function. The CRC was invented by W. Wesley Peterson in 1961; the 32-bit CRC function, used in Ethernet and many other standards, is the work of several researchers and was published in 1975. CRCs are based on the theory of cyclic error-correcting codes. The use of systematic cyclic codes, which encode messages by adding a fixed-length check value, for the purpose of error detection in communication networks, was first proposed by W. Wesley Peterson in 1961.Cyclic codes are not only simple to implement but have the benefit of being particularly well suited for the detection of burst errors: contiguous sequences of erroneous data symbols in messages. This is important because burst errors are common transmission errors in many communication channels, including magnetic and optical storage devices. Typically an n-bit CRC applied to a data block of arbitrary length will detect any single error burst not longer than n bits and the fraction of all longer error bursts that it will detect is (1 − 2−n). Specification of a CRC code requires definition of a so-called generator polynomial. This polynomial becomes the divisor in a polynomial long division, which takes the message as the dividend and in which the quotient is discarded and the remainder becomes the result. The important caveat is that the polynomial coefficients are calculated according to the arithmetic of a finite field, so the addition operation can always be performed bitwise-parallel (there is no carry between digits). In practice, all commonly used CRCs employ the Galois field of two elements, GF(2). The two elements are usually called 0 and 1, comfortably matching computer architecture. A CRC is called an n-bit CRC when its check value is n bits long. For a given n, multiple CRCs are possible, each with a different polynomial. Such a polynomial has highest degree n, which means it has n + 1 terms. In other words, the polynomial has a length of n + 1; its encoding requires n + 1 bits. Note that most polynomial specifications either drop the MSB or LSB, since they are always 1. The CRC and associated polynomial typically have a name of the form CRC-n-XXX as in the table below. The simplest error-detection system, the parity bit, is in fact a 1-bit CRC: it uses the generator polynomial x + 1 (two terms), and has the name CRC-1.