# What is Data Integrity?

> Data integrity is the property that data remains accurate, complete, consistent, traceable, and protected from unauthorized or unintended alteration or destruction throughout its lifecycle.

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## Content

It includes both security integrity — preventing or detecting impermissible change — and fitness for use, which depends on valid values, relationships, context, and provenance. Integrity applies while data is created, stored, processed, transmitted, restored, and disposed of.

Controls should preserve trustworthy meaning as well as bits. An unaltered record can still be wrong at creation, incomplete, stale, or detached from its source; an authorized change can also reduce integrity if it violates business rules or obscures history.

### Key points

- **Invalid-change prevention:** Use authorization, separation of duties, validated inputs, database constraints, controlled transformations, versioning, and safe interfaces appropriate to the data and process.
- **Context preservation:** Record sources, timestamps, definitions, transformations, approvals, and lineage so users can evaluate origin, meaning, completeness, and changes over time.
- **Detection and recovery:** Use reconciliation and protected audit logs; use checksums for accidental corruption and a message authentication code (MAC) or digital signature when malicious modification is in scope; preserve protected backups and test restoration with independent evidence of correctness.
- **Important limitation:** A hash comparison is meaningful only when the reference value and comparison process are trustworthy. Even then, a match shows only that selected bytes have not changed; it cannot prove that the original data was true, complete, properly authorized, or suitable for its intended use.

### Related terms

[Data security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/data-security/>) · [Data governance](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/data-governance/>) · [Data classification](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/data-classification/>) · [Data breach](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/data-breach/>) · [Cryptography](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cryptography/>)

### Sources

[NIST SP 1800-11: Data Integrity—Recovering from Ransomware and Other Destructive Events](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/1800/11/final) · [NIST SP 800-175B Rev. 1: Guideline for Using Cryptographic Standards](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/175/b/r1/final) · [NIST SP 1500-18 Rev. 2: Research Data Framework](https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/1500-18/NIST.SP.1500-18r2.html)

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