Data integrity - Citizendia

Data integrity is a term used in computer science and telecommunications that can mean ensuring data is "whole" or complete, the condition in which data are identically maintained during any operation (such as transfer, storage or retrieval), the preservation of data for their intended use, or, relative to specified operations, the a priori expectation of data quality. Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the Science of the theoretical foundations of Information and Computation and their Data quality is the Quality of Data. Data are of high quality "if they are fit for their intended uses in Operations Decision making and Put simply, data integrity is the assurance that data is consistent and correct.

Often such integrity is ensured by use of a number referred to as a Message Integrity Code (MIC) or Message Authentication Code (MAC). A cryptographic message authentication code (MAC is a short piece of information used to Authenticate a message A cryptographic message authentication code (MAC is a short piece of information used to Authenticate a message

In cryptography and information security in general, integrity refers to the validity of data. Cryptography (or cryptology; from Greek grc κρυπτός kryptos, "hidden secret" and grc γράφω gráphō, "I write" Information security means protecting information and information systems from unauthorized access use disclosure disruption modification or destruction Integrity can be compromised through:

Malicious altering, such as an attacker altering an account number in a bank transaction, or forgery of an identity document
Accidental altering, such as a transmission error, or a hard disk crash

Data integrity in a relational database is concerned with accuracy, correctness, and validity of the data in a database. Forgery is the process of making adapting or imitating objects statistics or documents (see False document) with the intent to deceive. Data transmission is the transfer of Data from point-to-point often represented as an Electro-magnetic Signal over a physical point-to-point or point-to-multipoint A head crash is a specific type of Hard disk failure, and occurs when the read-write head of a Hard disk drive touches its rotating platter A relational database is a Database that groups data using common attributes found in the data set A common variety of data integrity is referential integrity, which involves prevention of errors in Foreign Key to Primary Key relationships, such as an orphan child record that is missing its parent record (sometimes termed a dangling foreign key). Referential integrity in a Relational database is consistency between coupled tables In the context of Relational databases a foreign key is a referential constraint between two tables In Relational database design a unique key or primary key is a Candidate key to uniquely identify each row in a table.

An example of a data integrity mechanism in cryptography is the use of MD5 hash values. In Cryptography, MD5 ( Message-Digest algorithm 5) is a widely used partially insecure Cryptographic hash function with a 128- Bit hash value These blocks of bytes function as a numeric summation of the content of a data item. Should the data change, the MD5 hash would yield a different result.

See also