selfverifying

Self-verifying, sometimes written as self-verifying or self-verifying, is an adjective used to describe systems, processes, or claims that include mechanisms to verify their own correctness or truth without requiring external validation. The term is applied across fields such as engineering, computing, data integrity, and philosophy, and it typically implies built-in checks, self-diagnostic capabilities, or internally generated evidence of reliability.

In technology, self-verifying designs embed mechanisms that validate operation at runtime. Software may perform internal checks, assertions, and self-checksums to detect corruption or tampering; hardware can incorporate built-in self-test (BIST) circuitry and error-detecting codes; data storage may use parity or ECC to reveal faults automatically. Self-verifying software and hardware aim to increase reliability by identifying failures early and sometimes initiating corrective actions without human intervention.

In data transmission and storage, self-verifying formats rely on integrity codes such as checksums, parity bits, or cryptographic authentication codes so that receivers can confirm data integrity and origin independently. Self-verification is often a feature of systems requiring high fault tolerance or trust in environments where external validation is impractical.

In philosophy and mathematics, the idea of a system or proposition that fully proves its own truth or consistency is limited by results such as Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. While narrow self-checks can exist within a framework, universal self-verification of all truths within a system is generally impossible for sufficiently expressive theories.

Related concepts include self-diagnostic, self-test, built-in self-test, and integrity verification.