5 ms·
> Bit flips in network surely is many orders of magnitude worse Yes, but because it's so prevalent that people expect it, they've added checksums on multiple l
by groestl 8y ago
> Bit flips in network surely is many orders of magnitude worse
Yes, but because it's so prevalent that people expect it, they've added checksums on multiple levels, so the network actually performs better. In this particular instance (DNS queries), it's very unlikely that the data was corrupted in transit: "We believe that UDP checksums are effective at preventing 'bitsquat' attacks and other types of errors that occur after a DNS query leaves a DNS resolver and enters the network."
- tjoff 8y agoThat doesn't take into consideration of flaky home-routers (note that they do recalculate the checksum). So the checksum might be processed on bad data. For a bad connection it will also be quite common that the checksum will happen to be valid. TCP/UDP checksums are quite bad.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dfox 8y agoOne thing to keep in mind is that the network protocols usually use quite weak and similar checksums. To the extent that there are layer combinations that reliably produce errors that are not detectable by TCP checksum.
- acdha 8y agoHas anyone published results on the impact of large scale TLS deployment on reliability? I’ve seen some older papers on errors which TCP missed but it seems like making a hard fail would be a nice win as the crypto overhead keeps getting cheaper.