It’s an age-old problem in the digital world. When everything is more a less a pile of bits, it can be difficult to know what to trust. Billions of interactions rely on some level of trust. Sometimes humans need to trust things. Sometimes apps and infrastructure need to establish trust.
We talk endlessly about “resilience” these days. Resilience enables a material to resume its original shape or position after being bent, stretched, or compressed. It’s a model for systems that can quickly recover from corruption, faults or outages. Integrity, in contrast, prevents corruption in the the first place. Perhaps. It’s a good starting place in any case.
The idea behind digital integrity is relatively simple: every artifact, be it an image, a structured document, software package, a video, a dataset, should carry with it verifiable proof of its integrity: who made it, how it was made, and whether it has been altered along the way. Just as a signed contract in the physical world binds parties to an agreement, digital signatures can bind digital artifacts to their origins.
Like it or not, digital integrity is built on public key cryptography. (For an excellent history, see Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age.) A digital signature is a mathematical proof. It can’t be faked. It can be validated by anyone holding the corresponding public key.
With public key infrastructure, digital signatures can also give us an incorruptible link between an artifact and its creator. If we trust that source, we can put the public key or associated certificate somewhere, so that apps (such as browsers) know we trust the source. Apps can then act accordingly, for example, displaying only content that we trust.
But integrity goes beyond the mark of the maker—it can also contain proof of how the artifact was made. A piece of software isn’t trustworthy just because a known developer wrote it. The real question is: what process produced it? Was it compiled from source code in a secure environment? Were dependencies verified? Were steps in the workflow tampered with? That’s where attestations come in. Attestations are like digital ingredient labels or endorsements. They describe the steps, checks, and intermediaries involved in creation. Together, signatures and attestations make it possible to evaluate the integrity of both the artifact and the process that generated it.
Combining these elements invokes something powerful: digital artifacts that can travel anywhere and still be verifiable everywhere. Anyone, at any time, can confirm their authenticity, check their provenance, and apply policies to decide whether they should be trusted. This is where policy engines like OPA or Cedar come in, enabling people, apps, or agents to automate decisions about what to accept, what to reject, and how to handle artifacts based on verifiable facts rather than vague assumptions.
Why this matters economically
The economic case for digital integrity follows the same trajectory as software supply chain security. Before the SolarWinds breach, supply chain security was seen as a nice-to-have. After SolarWinds, it became a multi-billion-dollar inevitability. The cost of failure is lost contracts, regulatory fines, reputational collapse.
Content and digital media might be heading toward the same inflection point. Deepfakes, counterfeit data, AI hallucinations, and manipulated workflows are potential systemic risks. They can erode brand trust, disrupt markets, and undermine democratic discourse. The ROI for digital integrity may not be fully realized yet, but perhaps, at some point, a “SolarWinds moment” for content authenticity will occur, and when it does, adoption will accelerate sharply.
Unlike niche point-solutions, the addressable market for digital integrity is broad. Every industry depends on trustworthy digital artifacts:
- Financial services rely on transaction records and models.
- Healthcare relies on medical images, diagnostic data, and AI-assisted results.
- Media and advertising rely on trusted creative assets and brand content.
- AI ecosystems rely on datasets, prompts, and agent outputs.
Why this can’t be commoditized away by AI
It’s tempting to think AI could simply “do this work” or replace such systems. But digital integrity resists commoditization for one simple reason: it relies on cryptographic proofs, not generative output. AI can fabricate, simulate, or imitate—but it cannot conjure a valid digital signature or attestation without access to the underlying private keys and workflows.
Moreover, true integrity requires many layers:
- Key management and signing infrastructure.
- Distributed attestation systems.
- Policy engines capable of generalizing across contexts.
- Integrations into content pipelines, software CI/CD, and AI agent orchestration.
Each of these layers has to interlock, like armor plates. Building them is not just technically complex, it requires ecosystem adoption across standards bodies, vendors, and platforms. That defensibility makes digital integrity a durable category—one not easily copied or disrupted by cheap imitators.
The inevitability
Just as HTTPS went from “nice-to-have” to “table stakes” for every website, and just as multi-factor authentication went from optional to mandatory for enterprises, digital integrity will become a default expectation. Once established, it will reshape markets: assets that lack verifiable integrity will lose value, while those with it will command trust and premium access.
That’s the transformation: authenticity becomes currency. Not metaphorical currency, but a measurable, scarce, transferable property that determines what digital assets are worth engaging with.
The question isn’t if digital integrity will become ubiquitous. It’s when, and who will build the platforms and ecosystems to bring it to fruition.