A new construction of minimum distance robust codes

Abstract

Robust codes are codes that can detect any nonzero error with nonzero probability. This property makes them useful in protecting hardware systems from fault injection attacks which cause arbitrary number of bit flips. There are very few high rate robust codes, non of them has minimum distance greater than two. Therefore, robust codes with error correction capability are derived by concatenation of linear codes with high rate robust codes. This paper presents a new construction of non-linear robust codes with error correction capability. The codes are built upon linear codes; however, the redundant symbols that were originally allocated to increase the minimum distance of the code, are modified to provide both correction capability and robustness. Consequently, the codes are more effective and have higher rate than concatenated codes of the same error masking probability.