Integrity assures that data has not been altered (intentionally or unintentionally through bit errors) between a given origin in time or space and a given destination in some other time or space. Mechanisms, such as Cyclic Redundancy Codes (CRCs), exist to protect data from certain types of accidental or intentional bit errors during data transmission.

However, other means are necessary to protect data against more intentional or higher-level alterations to the data. These mechanisms typically include message digests and message authentication codes (MACs). A message digest, in particular, provides a value that can be compared before and after a message is sent to verify that the message has not been altered, and a MAC is a message digest with a key to make that message abbreviation secure. For auditing, MACs are used to secure the contents of audited data.

OpenEdge supports message digests and MACs for various components and services, including the AVM and OpenEdge RDBMS. These mechanisms are related to cryptography. For more information, see Cryptography.