Reed Solomon Alg MCP

reed-solomon-mcp

An MCP server that encodes, decodes, and explains Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes.

A small Model Context Protocol server written in Rust. It speaks JSON-RPC over stdio, has a single dependency (serde_json), and implements Reed-Solomon over GF(2^8) with primitive polynomial 0x11d, alpha = 2, and generator roots alpha^0 to alpha^(nsym-1).

Features

• Systematic encoding with any number of parity bytes (codeword length up to 255)
• Error location and correction with Berlekamp-Massey, Chien search and Forney
• Syndrome checks, generator polynomials and GF(256) arithmetic
• Test helpers that corrupt chosen bytes so you can watch decoding work

Tools

Quick start: use the published Docker image

The server is published in the MCP Registry as io.github.xkid1/reed-solomon-alg-mcp and ships as a public image on GHCR. You only need Docker.

docker pull ghcr.io/xkid1/reed-solomon-alg-mcp:0.1.0

VS Code (agent mode)

Add to .vscode/mcp.json (or your user MCP config):

{

"servers": { "reed-solomon": { "type": "stdio", "command": "docker", "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "ghcr.io/xkid1/reed-solomon-alg-mcp:0.1.0"] } } }

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{

"mcpServers": { "reed-solomon": { "command": "docker", "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "ghcr.io/xkid1/reed-solomon-alg-mcp:0.1.0"] } } }

Use `-i`, not `-t`: the transport needs a clean stdin/stdout pipe.

MCP Inspector

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector docker run -i --rm ghcr.io/xkid1/reed-solomon-alg-mcp:0.1.0

Try it

Ask your assistant: *"Encode 'hello' with 8 parity bytes, corrupt 3 bytes, then decode it."*

Or talk to the server by hand:

printf '%s\n' \

'{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2025-06-18","capabilities":{},"clientInfo":{"name":"t","version":"1"}}}' \ '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"notifications/initialized"}' \ '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"rs_encode","arguments":{"data":"Hello","parity_symbols":6}}}' \ | docker run -i --rm ghcr.io/xkid1/reed-solomon-alg-mcp:0.1.0

The encoded codeword is `48656c6c6fc0886617750e`.

Build from source

Requires a recent stable Rust toolchain.

git clone https://github.com/xkid1/reed-solomon-alg-mcp.git

cd reed-solomon-alg-mcp cargo build --release ./target/release/reed-solomon-mcp

Point a client at the binary instead of Docker:

{ "mcpServers": { "reed-solomon": { "command": "/absolute/path/to/target/release/reed-solomon-mcp" } } }

Development

cargo fmt --check

cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings cargo test cargo build --release && bash scripts/smoke-test.sh

Every pull request to `main` runs tests and builds first, then the code-convention checks. See [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md).

Limitations

• Codeword length is at most 255 bytes (GF(256)).
• Errors-only decoding: erasure decoding is not implemented.
• Beyond parity/2 errors the decoder may return an error or silently produce a different valid codeword. This is inherent to Reed-Solomon, so add an outer checksum if you need to detect that.
• Not a cryptographic tool: error correction gives no confidentiality or authenticity.

Project

• Contributing
• Code of Conduct
• Security Policy
• License (MIT)