AES as Error Correction: Cryptosystems for Reliable Communication

TL;DR

This paper explores using AES encryption as an error-correcting code to improve reliability in noisy communication systems, demonstrating comparable performance to traditional error-correcting codes through empirical analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach of employing AES as an error correction mechanism and proposes a modified mode of operation for practical multi-block error correction.

Findings

AES-based error correction approaches match random codes in performance

Simple padding with AES can approach the error correction capabilities of random codes

Modified counter mode enables multi-block error correction with AES

Abstract

In this paper, we show that the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cryptosystem can be used as an error-correcting code to obtain reliability over noisy communication and data systems. Moreover, we characterize a family of computational cryptosystems that can potentially be used as well performing error correcting codes. In particular, we show that simple padding followed by a cryptosystem with uniform or pseudo-uniform outputs can approach the error-correcting performance of random codes. We empirically contrast the performance of the proposed approach using AES as error correction with that of Random Linear Codes and CA-Polar codes and show that in practical scenarios, they achieve almost the same performance. Finally, we present a modified counter mode of operation, named input plaintext counter mode, in order to utilize AES for multiple blocks while retaining its error correcting capabilities.