CIA Triad: The Concept of Integrity

The second principle of the CIA Triad is Integrity. Integrity is the concept of protecting the reliability and correctness of data. This concept revolves around making sure all data is protected from unauthorized alterations.

Protection Examples:

Making sure that data is correct, unaltered, and preserved includes implementing various countermeasures such as strict access control, rigorous authentication procedures, intrusion detection systems, object/data encryption, hashing, interface restrictions, input/function checks, and personnel training.

Importance:

Integrity is critical for organizations due to deleted files, modifying files, entering invalid data, or altering configurations to name a few.

Attack Vectors:

Integrity is dependent on confidentiality. Numerous attacks focus on the violation of integrity such as viruses, logic bombs, coding errors, unauthorized access, back doors, and unintentional attacks such as human error.

Final Thoughts:

Integrity is maintained by making sure all data is intentionally modified by only authorized subjects. If a security system offers integrity, that means it offers a high level of assurance that the data, object, or resources have no been altered from their original state.