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 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 of 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 will detect a fraction 1/(1 − 2⁻ⁿ) of all longer error bursts.

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