Since 1996 it is already known that the wide used cryptographic algorithms, with formally proven security, can be broken by inducing errors during encryption process. Therefore, the threat of successful fault analysis is reasonable and some countermeasures have to be taken. One approach for achieving the security against fault analysis is to use error detection and error correction codes.

When we would like to choose the most appropriate error control code for a given application we are interested of its error-control capabilities. Measures of this capabilities are the probability of undetected errors and the probability of correct decoding. In order to be able to check these characteristics of the code we need its weight, cosets' leaders weight and cosets' weight distributions. A list of all binary cyclic codes of length up to 33, some binary distance-optimal codes of length up to 33 and all cyclic redundancy check codes of up to 10-bit redundancy is prepared and all the weight spectra necessary for checking their error control performance are calculated. Then, depending on the conditions on which the code will be used, its error control performance can be checked with any precision for a linear time and the most suitable one can be chosen.