Integrity

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Integrity preserves the accuracy, completeness, consistency, and authorised state of Information, systems, and artifacts.

Integrity controls detect or prevent unauthorised creation, alteration, substitution, deletion, reordering, or destruction. These controls also identify accidental changes and processing errors that affect the trustworthiness of information or system state.

Controls supporting Integrity include cryptographic digests, digital signatures, checksums, validation rules, version control, immutable records, controlled change procedures, Access Control, and Provenance records.

Integrity remains distinct from Confidentiality. Integrity concerns accuracy, completeness, and authorised state. Confidentiality concerns unauthorised availability or disclosure.

property of information, a system, or an artifact that preserves its accuracy, completeness, and authorised state

Adapted from ISO/IEC 27000, Information security, cybersecurity and privacy protection — Vocabulary.

Integrity applies to information content and to the relationships, order, context, provenance, and metadata required to interpret the information correctly.

An integrity control identifies the protected object, the applied method, the responsible authority or process, and the result of the integrity assessment.

A successful integrity assessment establishes correspondence with the applicable integrity criterion. It does not independently establish the truth, quality, or legal validity of the protected content.

A verified digital signature establishes that a Configuration Record has not changed since the identified signer applied the signature.