Techniques are described for decoding a message. In one example, the techniques include obtaining a first message comprising a plurality of information bits and a plurality of parity bits, decoding the first message using an iterative decoding algorithm to generate a first bit sequence, generating a miscorrection metric based at least on the first bit sequence and one or more reliability values corresponding to one or more bits in the first message, determining whether a miscorrection happened in the decoder by comparing the miscorrection metric with a first threshold, and upon determining that a miscorrection did not happen, outputting the first bit sequence as a decoded message.