Authenticity, integrity and provenance assurance across the cyber stack: A systematic review of detection, watermarking, authentication and cryptographic mechanisms
Keywords:
Systematic review, PRISMA 2020, Integrity assurance, Provenance verification, Repackaging detectionAbstract
Assurance of authenticity, integrity and provenance recurs across the computing stack, but relevant research communities often publish in isolation. This protocol-driven systematic review appraises a bounded contemporary evidence base across five assurance layers--application, media, network, protocol and implementation--to identify cross-layer regularities and evidential asymmetries. Following PRISMA 2020, we enumerated peer-reviewed research published in Cyber Security and Applications, Volume 4 (2026), as available on 15 September 2026. Nine records were identified; four were excluded at title/abstract screening under the pre-specified eligibility criteria, and five satisfied all inclusion criteria at full-text assessment. Statistical heterogeneity precluded meta-analysis, so a narrative synthesis was undertaken. The included studies span application artefacts, media objects, physical-network devices, cryptographic protocols and micro-architectural implementations. Four use machine learning and one supplies security proofs with formal verification. Reported outcomes include watermark accuracy of 99.91%, spoofing-detection accuracy of 94.18%, total signcryption cost of 887 ms for ten receivers with linearly growing transmission cost, and recovery of a masked AES key within approximately 60 attack traces. Methodological quality ranged from 81.3% to 93.8%. Across layers, assurance mechanisms converge on an invariance principle: they seek representations stable under benign transformation but sensitive to adversarial modification. The evidence also shows an asymmetry between empirical and provable assurance and uneven benchmark maturity across layers. The review was not prospectively registered; the protocol is reproduced in Section 2 and Appendices A--C.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Kolawole Olamide Michael, Lebo Norabel Ikaka, Nathaniel Etim Effiom, Murphy Reje-Okim Mbeh, Faith Bassey-Ita Bassey, Bitrus Levi Garki, Oyui Daniel Lawrence, Samuel Okon Essang
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