Which of the following statements about UDP is true?

• A. It uses a three-way handshake before data transfer.
• B. It does not guarantee delivery, order, or error checking.
• C. It always requires a response from the destination.
• D. It always encrypts payload data.

Answer: (B)

UDP is a connectionless, best-effort transport protocol. It does not establish a connection or perform a handshake before sending data, so there is no guarantee that a packet will arrive, nor that it will arrive in order. Packets can be lost, arrive out of order, or be duplicated, and the protocol provides no built-in mechanism for reliable delivery or retransmission. A checksum exists to detect corruption, but it does not provide error correction or delivery guarantees.

Encryption is not provided by UDP itself; securing UDP requires additional layers (like DTLS or application-layer encryption). Because of its lack of delivery guarantees, lack of ordering, and absence of built-in error handling, the statement that best describes UDP is that it does not guarantee delivery, order, or error checking.