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6 Security, Privacy and Data Integrity

Data Integrity

➢ Data Integrity is ensuring data entered and stored in a computer is accurate and up to date and
ensuring the validity of data.

Data Privacy

➢ Data privacy involves ensuring that the data is protected from unauthorized access and only
available to authorized users.

Data Security

➢ Data security involves securing the data stored in a computer from accidential or malicious
damage or loss and ensuring that the data is recoverable it lost or corrupted.

1.6.1 Data Security

➢ Security involves two aspects;
• Data Security
• Security of the computer system (computer Security)
➢ Computer security can be achieved the following methods,
• User accounts
• Firewalls
• Authentication techniques (passwords and digital signatures)

User Accounts

➢ In a multi-user environment it is important that different users are provided with individual user
accounts.
➢ This can be associated with a password to carry out authentication to ensure and verify the
users identity.

Firewall

➢ A firewall is a combination of hardware and software that monitors all incoming and outgoing
transmission from and to a computer over the network and;
• Prevent unauthorized access to the computer over the network.
• Prevent the users from accessing unauthorized websites on the internet.
• Prevent viruses entering to the system over the network helping the anti-virus software.

Authentication

➢ Authentication is carried out to verify the users identity to ensure that the user is actually the
person who he/she claims to be.
➢ Authentication can be carried out by using passwords, biometric devices, digital signatures.

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Password

➢ Passwords can be associated with user accounts to authenticate the user.

➢ For the passwords to be effective, the password needs a large no. of characters including a mix
of numbers, letters and special characters.

Biometric Devices

➢ Biometric device are capable of identifying the unique characteristics of a person.

➢ There are different biometric devices such as fingerprint scanner, retina scanner, facial
recognition and etc.
➢ These methods can be combined with passwords to make effective.

Digital Signatures

➢ Digital signature are used in emails to allows the receiver to be confident the message which can
be used to identify the sender uniquely.

Data Security

➢ Data security can be achieved using the following methods to protect the data stored and to
ensure that the data is recoverable:
• Data Backups
• Disk mirroring strategy
• Encryption
• Authorization (Access Rights)

Backups

Refer 1.5.2

Disk Mirroring Strategy

➢ Disk mirroring strategy is where the data is simultaneously stored on two disks during the
normal operation of the system.
➢ In case of a data loss or damaged is one disk, the other disk can be used to recover the data lost.

Encryption

➢ Encryption is the process of converting data into an unreadable format, before the data is
transmitted to prevent data misuse by unauthorized access ensuring that the data can only be
interpreted by the lender and the receiver.

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Authorization (Access Rights)

➢ Different users are authorized to access by logging into a computer system, but not all the users
are authorized to access all the parts of the computer system, instead different users’ needs to
be allowed to only access the data that they need.
➢ This can be achieved by assigning different access rights to different parts of the data stored by
categorising the users into different categories and defining an authorization policy which gives
different access rights to different files for different individuals and user categories.

1.6.2 Data Integrity

➢ It is ensuring that the data stored in a computer is safeguarded and is secure and accurate.

Data Validation

➢ It is an automatic check, carried out by the computer when data is being entered into the
computer, to ensure that entered data is sensible and according to the given criteria.

Validation Check

Range Check

➢ Checks whether the entered data falls within a given range of values.

Eg:- month in a date must not exceed 12.

Character Check

➢ Checks whether only valid characters / digits are entered.

Eg:- Name must only consist of letters.

Format Check

➢ Checks whether the entered data is in the correct format.

Eg:- A date has to be dd/mm/yyyy.

Length Check

➢ Checks whether entered data contains the exact number of digits required.
Eg:- A telephone number must have exactly 10 digits.

Check Digit

➢ It is an additional digit added to a set of numbers which is calculated using these set of numbers
which is used to validate when the number is entered.

Eg:- 9 7 2 1 5 8 4 Check digit

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (digit position)

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 (7x9) + (6x7) + (5x2) + (4x1) +(3x5) + (2x8) =150

150 Remainder = 7
11

11 – 7 = 4

Data Verification

It is carried out to ensure that the data transmitted from one medium to another or the data entered is
correctly transferred and is same as the original source.

For Data Entry;

1. Double Entry
➢ It is where data is entered twice and is automatically compared against each other to
identify for any errors and it both the revisions are not the same data is reentered.
Eg:- When creating a password.

2. Visual Check
➢ It is where the entered data is compared against the original source visually by someone
to identify any errors.

For Data Transmission;

3. Checksum
➢ If involves calculating the sum of the block of be transmitted before sending the data
and it is sent along with to the receiver.
➢ Once the data is received the sum of the received bytes are calculated and compared
with the previous calculated sum to identify any errors.
➢ If the two sums are different then it identifies that there has been an error and all the
bytes are sent again.
4. Parity Check
➢ If involves counting the number of is in a byte.
➢ The two devices agree upon a rule either odd parity or even parity.
• If even parity is used the byte must have even number of 1’s else it must have
odd number of 1’s.
➢ Once the data is received the number of 1’s are recalculated to identify any error and is
there is any error, the byte is resent.
➢ A drawback of this method is that if there are two errors in the same byte (a I has
become a 0 and a 0 has become a 1) parity check will not identify if as an error.

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