Re: TCP data corruption
Michael_google gmail_Gersten <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.macosx.admin |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
> The question is, can data be corrupted without detection or correction, over TCP/IP? It seems like the checksumming used by TCP/IP is considered weak by modern standards. So there is the possibility of undetected and uncorrected corruption, but I don't know how probable it is. Answer: Yes. Even if you assume that TCP gives you 100% network transmission accuracy, that does NOTHING for driver copy error, or memory failure, etc. Look up silent data corruption. Be amazed that you can get double bit uncorrectable errors from systems where that is supposed to be impossible. Be amazed that some hardware will, under reproducible situations, give you 100% chance of a corrupt packet with no hardware notice that it is corrupt. You have to have end to end, final check of transmitted data. Lacking this, you have at best a mostly error free, unvalidated stream. Yes, since IP checksums and TCP checksums are calculated in the driver, any error in the packet going in/out of the network hardware should be detected. That still means at least one copy, possibly more, in memory without error checking. -- Political and economic blog of a strict constitutionalist http://StrictConstitution.BlogSpot.com