The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released white papers on digital identity and authentication ahead of a key workshop. The three papers focus separately on the strength of identity proofing, strength of biometric authentication, and attribute metadata and confidence scoring and have been released ahead of the 12-13 January workshop "Applying Measurement Science in the Identity Ecosystem".In a blog post, the organisation wrote: "Our belief in the NSTIC NPO is that the digital identity market is now maturing and innovating at a rate that demands a stronger measurement-based approach to evaluating the performance of identity solutions."NIST gave brief descriptions of the papers:Measuring Strength of Identity Proofing: We identify potential approaches to standardize a scoring framework for identity proofing. The goal is to give relying parties a baseline understanding of the process that led to an individual obtaining a credential and to enable the selection of proofing practices better aligned with assessed risk. Encouraging feedback at the workshop, we ask, for example: Is there a framework that can determine the ability for correctly guessing knowledge-based questions? Or inversely, those that cannot be guessed?Measuring Strength of Authentication: We identify potential methods for measuring biometric authentication implementations to support a standardized scoring structure. Although we start with biometric authenticators, the intent is to produce a generalizable scoring structure to enable the comparison of different authenticator types and determine composite scores for multifactor schemes. For example, we ask: What is the best course of action to determine an authentication scoring framework?Attribute Metadata and Confidence Scoring: For attributes, we examine the development of standardized metadata and potential approaches for determining confidence scores to assist with authorization decision making. Readers can consider, for example: In what ways would the addition of attribute metadata impact an organization's infrastructure, operations, and performance?You can access the whitepapers here.
NIST launches white papers on digital identity
