Integrity in CIA refers to what?

• A. The protection of system data from unauthorized changes; ensuring data is trustworthy and untampered
• B. Maintaining uptime of the system
• C. Encrypting all communications
• D. Ensuring only admins can access data

Answer: (A)

Integrity in the CIA triad means keeping data accurate, trustworthy, and unaltered. It focuses on preventing unauthorized modifications, deletions, or corruption of information so that what you retrieve is exactly what it is supposed to be. To support this, organizations use techniques like checksums or hashes to detect tampering, digital signatures to verify who created or changed data, audit trails to track changes, and robust change-control and access policies to stop improper edits. When data remains consistent and untampered across systems and over time, its integrity is preserved, which is the core idea behind this concept. The other options describe uptime (availability), protecting data in transit through encryption (confidentiality), or restricting access to administrators (authorization), which relate to other aspects of security rather than what integrity emphasizes.