This paper presents a novel error detection linear feedback shift register (ED-LFSR), which can be used to realize error detection with a small hardware overhead for various applications such as error-correction codes, encryption algorithms and pseudo-random number generation. Although the traditional redundancy methods allow the incorporation of the error detection/correction capability in the original LFSRs, they suffer from a considerable amount of hardware overheads. The proposed ED-LFSR alleviates such problems by employing the parity check technique. The experimental results indicate that the proposed ED-LFSR requires an additional area of only 31.1% compared to that required by the conventional LFSR and it saves 39.1% and 31.9% of the resources compared to the corresponding utilization of the hardware and time redundancy methods.