There is a lot of literature about CRC. May be too much. Because CRC is, in essence, a very simple concept. Not much more complicated than a division with remainder. Probably the main problem is, that CRC is both a mathematical concept and a technical, hardware or software driven implementation.

The mathematical point of view is that CRC is a small, unimportant sector of a galaxy called “Algebraic Coding Theory”. Mathematicians aren't much interested in technically “good” codes, since these have already been discovered and analyzed long ago. So don't expect much help from mathematicians (except for me, of course). Mathematically “interesting” codes may have poor data rates (ratio between “net” data and overhead required for redundancy), which make them uninteresting for technical use. On the other side, computer oriented people seem to feel little challenge on fully understanding the math behind the CRC. They just want to have their algorithm working.

There is a CRC reference implementation on the net which helped for many purposes. But this implementation also created a couple of problems, because people tend to use available implementations without fully understanding them.

When trying to understand CRC, the main concept to grab is that data is not represented as integer numbers, but as coefficients of a polynomial. Since most computer hardware has been designed to crunch numbers, not polynomials, a little bit of hand work is required, which makes the computation slightly more complicated than integer division. Again, a lot of stuff has been published on that matter.

One important fact to note is that there is not just one way to represent (binary) polynomials in a computer. Take a look at the eight bits of a byte. Each of them represent a coefficient. But which one?

There are in fact two good choices. One which I call “native”, where the meaning of a bit with the binary value is the coefficient of . This is the representation used in Ross Williams reference implementation. The other is called representation in “network” order. Network order applies to network applications, where data is transmitted serially, bit by bit, over a wire or other media. When transmitting a polynomial via serial communications, the highest coefficient is always transmitted first, in order to make CRC computation feasible with simple electronic devices like shift registers. Therefore, in serial communications, the meaning of a bit depends on the transmission order, which is usually least significant bit (LSB) to most significant bit (MSB).

The consequence is, that in “network” bit order, the LSB bears the highest polynomial coefficient and the MSB bears the lowest coefficient. This is just the opposite of the “native” order. In order to accomodate for network order, Ross Williams' reference implementation introduces the notion of “reflected” data and/or result polynomial (parameters “refin”/“refout”). However, the reference implementation provides a number of parameters which cannot be chosen at random, and this is which might make the correct selection of the parameters difficult.