Iterative bit-flipped decoding of concatenated reed solomon/convolutional codes with HMAC

Cryptography and Coding theory are believed to have common roots. Foundations for both the fields were laid down by Claude Shannon. There is, however, very little research being done to investigate the relationship between the two and to see how one field can be used to benefit the other. In this contribution an interesting case study is considered to improve the channel coding results of concatenated Reed Solomon and Convolutional codes using cryptographic hash function and on the other hand to recover and verify the cryptographic hash code using the RS/Convolutional code with iterative bit flipped decoding. This is of interest for the applications that need security as well as resilience to communication errors. It is also demonstrated that a coding gain is achieved at the same time.