  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.
