File Integrity

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does File Integrity Mean?

File integrity in IT refers to the process of protecting a file from unauthorized changes, including cyber-attacks. In other words, a file’s ‘integrity’ is validated to determine whether or not it has been altered after its creation, curation, archiving or other qualifying event.

Advertisements

Techopedia Explains File Integrity

Tech companies have built various file integrity monitoring tools to help system administrators determine whether a file’s integrity is intact. IT pros who perform file integrity monitoring sometimes use the "checksum" method to compare two versions of a data set.

In addition, many file integrity monitoring tools use "hashing," a method of creating and comparing cryptographic keys to determine whether a file has been altered or whether it has integrity. Some of these tools feature new automated "agent-less" monitoring, which was developed to cut costs; these tools perform a more thorough job of integrity monitoring and require less work in terms of deployment and implementation.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.