Device errors can result in corrupted data being placed in receive buffers. Such corruption is indistinguishable from corruption that occurs beyond the domain of the device—for example, within a network. Typically, existing software is already in place to handle such corruption; for example, through integrity checks at the transport layer of a protocol stack or within the application using the device.
If the received data will not be checked for integrity at a higher layer—as in the case of a disk driver, for example—it can be integrity-checked within the driver itself. Methods of detecting corruption in received data are typically device-specific (checksums, CRC, and so forth).