The integrity of digital information: mechanics and definitional issues

This article surveys the issues of integrity of digital information in the networked environment. The emphasis is on the content of specific digital objects as they are transferred and transformed and on the meanings of integrity in these contexts, rather than on broader questions related to the migration of a system of literature into electronic formats. The current state of the art in techniques used to maintain information integrity such as document digest algorithms and cryptographic signatures is also briefly surveyed. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.