Packet reliability in gRPC - checksum?

[agup...@slb.com]

Hi,

Does gRPC out of the box provide any guarantees for packet integrity over the network? Do we need to implement CRC or checksum as a field in the protobuf spec and use that to ensure that no packet corruption happened? 

This is in content of gRPC with Google cloud endpoints (ESP) if that matters. Also, SSL is enabled between client and ESP. 

-Abhishek

[Evan Jones]

I spent more time than I would like investigating an issue caused by packet corruption in the past [1]. As a result, I am a firm believer that protocols carrying "important" data should be checksummed. In your case: If you are using SSL, that protocol itself carries strong cryptographic hashes over the data, which serves the same purpose. If corruption occurs, it is likely the SSL protocol will cause a connection break, but your application will not receive corrupt data. I would consider this sufficient.

[1] http://www.evanjones.ca/tcp-and-ethernet-checksums-fail.html