Does Violation of integrity violate privacy in communication?

Question

I have asked many people about this question but they said, integrity must be conserved for the privacy of any communication system. Is it correct that integrity violation violate the privacy too?

Answer 1

Integrity is generally accepted as a basic security property, and maintaining security properties is important for protecting privacy, even if integrity itself is not typically considered a privacy property.

Integrity is a pre-requisite for being able to trust the communications that a user receives. If an attacker can modify the messages that I believe are coming from a trusted correspondent, then I might reveal information based on that message (the attacker could redirect me to a fake URL, or impersonate my friend and convince me to inadvertently reveal something confidential to the attacker). That is, integrity is a necessary building block for authentication, on which we have built many privacy assurances.

I would say integrity is also privacy-relevant in other ways. Privacy involves communicating choices in my communications, and if I don't have integrity of communications, I can't be sure that my preferences are expressed to the other party. And privacy can also include protection from intrusion -- without integrity, an attacker can modify the messages a user receives to include abuse.