integritets

Integritet, or integrity, refers to the correctness, consistency, and trustworthiness of information, systems, and processes. It denotes that data has not been altered in an unauthorized way and remains reliable from creation through storage, transmission, and use. Integrity is one of the core goals in information security, alongside confidentiality and availability, and it underpins trust in digital services, audits, and regulatory compliance.

To protect integrity, organizations implement controls to prevent unauthorized changes, detect tampering, and restore data when needed. Technical measures include cryptographic hashes and checksums to detect changes, digital signatures and MACs to verify authorship and origin, append-only logs to preserve history, and cryptographic techniques such as Merkle trees for scalable integrity verification. Process-wise, change management, access controls, and versioning help ensure only authorized updates occur, and strong audit trails support incident investigation.

Database integrity covers referential and data integrity constraints that enforce consistency between related records, validation rules on inputs, and transactional guarantees (ACID properties) to ensure that operations are atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable.

Software and hardware integrity involve protecting code, configurations, and firmware from tampering. Techniques include secure boot, code signing, runtime attestation, and supply chain security measures to verify component integrity.

Privacy and personal integrity relate to respecting and protecting individuals' autonomy and preventing misuse of personal data. Breaches threaten both data integrity and trust.

Standards and frameworks, such as ISO/IEC 27001, NIST SP 800-series, and COBIT, address governance of information integrity and related controls. In distributed systems, blockchain and tamper-evident logs offer paths to verifiable integrity across participants.

Maintaining integrity is an ongoing process, requiring monitoring, testing, backups, disaster recovery, and regular reviews of policies and configurations to mitigate threats such as data corruption, insider misuse, and software bugs.