What does an audit trail provide?

An audit trail provides a comprehensive record of events and activities related to information handling within a system. It allows for tracing activities back to their original sources, enabling organizations to monitor, review, and investigate changes and user actions. This capability is essential for ensuring accountability, compliance with regulations, and enhancing security within systems.

By maintaining detailed records of transactions, logs, and modifications, audit trails help organizations identify unauthorized access or anomalies. The information captured in an audit trail can be crucial during security assessments or forensic investigations, as it helps track who did what, when, and how.

In contrast, other options relate to different aspects of security technology and practices. An automated access control system is focused on managing who can access information and systems but does not inherently provide a historical record of user actions. A method for encrypting data is aimed at protecting information from unauthorized access during transit or storage, while a communication protocol for secure data transfer outlines rules for securely transmitting data across networks, neither of which relates to tracing activities back to their origins.