On Friday, 17 January 2014 at 14:06:57 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
Doesn't TCP take care of that?
For a packet, yes. In general you can assume that if a transfer completes under TCP then it is very likely correct. That's the way TCP is designed. If you want to check the entire file at the end, MD5 could theoretically be done as a sanity check. I'd still use SHA-2 (in the form of a digital signature, obviously) minimally if your intention is to ensure it hasn't been tampered with, but the speed, simplicity, and availability of MD5 can be arguments for its use as long as you're not actually concerned about security.
