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.