Which elements are essential for maintaining data integrity?

Maintaining data integrity is crucial in cybersecurity, and the correct answer emphasizes the role of digital signatures and hashes in ensuring this integrity. Digital signatures provide a way to verify that data has not been altered during transmission or storage. They use cryptographic techniques to ensure that only the legitimate sender could have created the signature, and because it’s based on the content of the message, any change in the data would invalidate the signature.

Hashes, on the other hand, create a unique fixed-size string of characters from input data. This means that even a small change in the original data would result in a completely different hash value. By comparing hashes before and after data transmission or storage, one can easily determine if the data remains unchanged.

Together, digital signatures and hashes provide a strong method for verifying both the authenticity and integrity of data. They are fundamental in many security protocols and are widely used to secure sensitive information transmitted over networks.

In contrast, while elements like availability and hashing can contribute to overall data security, they do not encompass the full scope of maintaining integrity as effectively as digital signatures and hashes. Logging and encryption play important roles in security management and confidentiality, respectively, but they do not inherently protect data from unauthorized alterations. Access controls and redundancy are important for availability