Non-repudiation

Non-repudiation refers to a state of affairs where the author of a statement will not be able to successfully challenge the authorship of the statement or validity of an associated contract. The term is often seen in a legal setting wherein the authenticity of a signature is being challenged. In such an instance, the authenticity is being "repudiated".

In a general sense non-repudiation involves associating actions or changes to a unique individual. For a secure area, for example, it may be desirable to implement a key card access system. Non-repudiation would be violated if it were not also a strictly enforced policy to prohibit sharing of the key cards and to immediately report lost or stolen cards. Otherwise determining who performed the action of opening the door cannot be trivially determined. Similarly, for computer accounts, the individual owner of the account must not allow others to use that account, especially, for instance, by giving away their account's password, and a policy should be implemented to enforce this. This prevents the owner of the account from denying actions performed by the account.

Regarding digital security, the cryptological meaning and application of non-repudiation shifts to mean:

Proof of data integrity is typically the easiest of these requirements to accomplish. A data hash, such as SHA2, is usually sufficient to establish that the likelihood of data being undetectably changed is extremely low. Even with this safeguard, it is still possible to tamper with data in transit, either through a man-in-the-middle attack or phishing. Due to this flaw, data integrity is best asserted when the recipient already possesses the necessary verification information.

The most common method of asserting the digital origin of data is through digital certificates, a form of public key infrastructure to which digital signatures belong. Note that the public key scheme is not used for encryption in this form; i.e. the goal is not to achieve confidentiality, since a message signed with a private key can be read by anyone using the public key. Verifying the digital origin means that the certified/signed data can be, with reasonable certainty, trusted to be from somebody who possesses the private key corresponding to the signing certificate. If the key is not properly safeguarded by the original owner, digital forgery can become a major concern.

...
Wikipedia