Introducing soft verification as an improvement of hard verification of cryptographic check values

“Soft is better than hard” - this sentence explains the meaning of one of the most important innovations in coding theory during the 90´s: the usage of soft output in Soft Input Soft Output decoding and the appearance of Turbo Codes. The same principle may be applied to the verification mechanisms of cryptographic check values: instead of standard or hard verification, soft verification can be used. This paper concentrates on the difference between hard and soft cryptographic verification, using algorithms for correction of messages protected by cryptographic check values based on hard, i.e. soft verification. Simulation results show advantages in message correction using soft vs. hard verification.