7.10. Checksums

Checksums are used to ensure the integrity of data portions for data transmission or storage. A checksum is basically a calculated summary of such a data portion.

Network data transmissions often produce errors, such as toggled, missing or duplicated bits. As a result, the data received might not be identical to the data transmitted, which is obviously a bad thing.

Because of these transmission errors, network protocols very often use checksums to detect such errors. The transmitter will calculate a checksum of the data and transmits the data together with the checksum. The receiver will calculate the checksum of the received data with the same algorithm as the transmitter. If the received and calculated checksums don’t match a transmission error has occurred.

Some checksum algorithms are able to recover (simple) errors by calculating where the expected error must be and repairing it.

If there are errors that cannot be recovered, the receiving side throws away the packet. Depending on the network protocol, this data loss is simply ignored or the sending side needs to detect this loss somehow and retransmits the required packet(s).

Using a checksum drastically reduces the number of undetected transmission errors. However, the usual checksum algorithms cannot guarantee an error detection of 100%, so a very small number of transmission errors may remain undetected.

There are several different kinds of checksum algorithms; an example of an often used checksum algorithm is CRC32. The checksum algorithm actually chosen for a specific network protocol will depend on the expected error rate of the network medium, the importance of error detection, the processor load to perform the calculation, the performance needed and many other things.

Further information about checksums can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checksum.

Wireshark will validate the checksums of many protocols, e.g. IP, TCP, UDP, etc.

It will do the same calculation as a “normal receiver” would do, and shows the checksum fields in the packet details with a comment, e.g. [correct] or [invalid, must be 0x12345678].

Checksum validation can be switched off for various protocols in the Wireshark protocol preferences, e.g. to (very slightly) increase performance.

If the checksum validation is enabled and it detected an invalid checksum, features like packet reassembly won’t be processed. This is avoided as incorrect connection data could “confuse” the internal database.

The checksum calculation might be done by the network driver, protocol driver or even in hardware.

For example: The Ethernet transmitting hardware calculates the Ethernet CRC32 checksum and the receiving hardware validates this checksum. If the received checksum is wrong Wireshark won’t even see the packet, as the Ethernet hardware internally throws away the packet.

Higher level checksums are “traditionally” calculated by the protocol implementation and the completed packet is then handed over to the hardware.

Recent network hardware can perform advanced features such as IP checksum calculation, also known as checksum offloading. The network driver won’t calculate the checksum itself but will simply hand over an empty (zero or garbage filled) checksum field to the hardware.

	Note
	Checksum offloading often causes confusion as the network packets to be transmitted are handed over to Wireshark before the checksums are actually calculated. Wireshark gets these “empty” checksums and displays them as invalid, even though the packets will contain valid checksums when they leave the network hardware later.

Checksum offloading can be confusing and having a lot of [invalid] messages on the screen can be quite annoying. As mentioned above, invalid checksums may lead to unreassembled packets, making the analysis of the packet data much harder.

You can do two things to avoid this checksum offloading problem: