What method is commonly used to verify data integrity in a system?

Hashing is commonly used to verify data integrity because it transforms input data into a fixed-size string of characters, which is typically a hash code. This process ensures that even a small change in the input data will produce a significantly different hash output. When data is transmitted or stored, the hash can be generated and then checked against a later generated hash of the same data to confirm that the data has not been altered or corrupted during transmission or storage. If the hashes match, the data integrity is intact; if they differ, it indicates that the data may have been compromised or modified.

Encryption, while it is crucial for securing data, is not primarily focused on integrity verification. It ensures that data is unreadable to unauthorized users but does not provide a direct mechanism for confirming whether the content has remained unchanged. Similarly, checksums serve a related purpose but are less secure than hashing methods and can be more susceptible to different types of errors. Compression serves to reduce the size of the data for storage or transmission but does not inherently address either integrity or security concerns.