Question

Can a computer system without integrity provide confidentiality? Can a computer system without confidentiality provide integrity? Justify your answers. Note: Consider computer systems, but do NOT consider cryptography or secure communications.

Answer 1

Without integrity no system can provide confidentiality. In case of not maintaining the integrity, the existence of the information can be revealed thus compromising the confidentiality. If the information kept in the data is altered the data might be still confidential but may contain “garbage”, which makes its confidentiality meaningless.

Other than that to be able to enforce confidentiality, at least you need the integrity of the hardware the system is running upon. If there is no integrity, then there is no guarantee of secure operations on that system, which compromises confidentiality.

A system can provide integrity without confidentiality. For example, a public library has a database about the books stored in the database. Since the library is open to public, everyone can access this database, so there is no confidentiality at all, but since the users accessing the database are not allowed to change the information stored in the database integrity of the system is not compromised.