Assurance
From MgmtWiki
Full Title or Meme
The level of trust that can be afforded a claim of an Identifier or Attribute.
Context
- Some means for assuring the Web Site Security is required. See that page for details.
- The rest of this page is about establishing a level of assurance for User Information about a User also known as a Subject.
- NIST 800-63-3
For a User that wants some Assurance about a Web Site see Trusted Third Party.
Problems
- In contexts where names are not validated (of low Assurance) the problem arises that trolls many adopt the name of some well-known person to be able to make statements that falsely appear to be from the real person.[1]
- See discussion on the pages for Ephemeral and Persistent.
- Most of the existing protocols, like OpenID Connect and SAML 2.0 support the older NIST SP 800-63-2 level of assurance ratings. These are also baked into RFC 6711 "An IANA Registry for Level of Assurance (LoA) Profiles" and ISO/IEC 291151.
Solutions
A rather facile mapping of the NIST SP 800-63-3 levels of Assurance to the processes known today is:
- AAL1 ==> password
- AAL2 ==> 2FA
- AAL3 ==> U2F
The best source of Truth about an Identity is obtained by documentation of the Identity Proofing process. That is something that can be audited to measure reality against expectations.
References
- Synonyms include: Validated which typically is used with Assurance of claims, or Attested which typically is used with Assurance of User Devices.
