Threats

2Tampering and Integrity

When the Millennium Falcon escapes from the Death Star, Han is right to worry that it's too easy. There are two reasons for that: Obi-Wan has tampered with the power supply to a tractor beam, and the Falcon itself has been tampered with: a homing beacon has been placed onboard.

Introduction

Tampering, where the data you get is not what was stored or sent, is a threat to the integrity of that data. The most common ways tampering manifests are failures of storage integrity and failures of communication integrity, but there are also many ways to tamper with the integrity of a process or with the physical integrity of a device. There's tampering with systems after an attack has succeeded. There also are questions of integrity in distributed systems and issues of atomicity in database systems. Integrity protections can protect you from both intentional tampering and reliability failures, caused by cosmic rays, mechanical or logical failures, or other random processes.

There are situations where the integrity of either storage or communication fails because you're talking to the wrong file or the wrong server. When that's enemy action, rather than a mistake, each of those can be a spoofing problem, which leads to the same problems as an integrity failure, but the actual files are intact or the right server would provide you with the right response. Integrity also bleeds into availability when the attack is to delete a file.

Targets of Tampering

When the ...