High Assurance AZ Token

Full Title

Structure of a stand-alone Token that can provide high assurance of (1) Identity, (2) Authentication and (3) Federation in high volume, universally accessed web services.

Context

• The page is directed to the problem of providing high assurance identifier tokens that can be used for high volume use cases, such as health services.
• Existing standards for identifier tokens are based on the assurance of the trust of the Relying Party (aka client) in the tokens produced by the Identifier provider, typically on of the well-known social sites.
• To get high assurance identifiers, the web site that wants the higher level of assurance (whether RP or IDP) will perform additional validation of the user with protocols like FIDO Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) 1.x or Web Authentication (aka Fido 2.0).
• Pew charitable trust and MITRE have recommended the use of the Smart Phone as a source of patient identifiers in healthcare.

Problems

• The IdP needs to be trusted by the RP. That can be difficult to achieve when the RP has the high value resource that the user wants to access.
• The users are accustomed to using the "free" social media sites as an IDP that will be trusted by the RP.
• The liability associated with high assurance IDPs is not likely to be available on "free" social media sites.
• The assurance associated with out-of-band assurance, like web authentication has not been successful with the large number people that are expected to be using high assurance sites, like health services.
• While standards exist for cryptographic operations in software (FIPS 140 and common criteria) there is not similar controls on assuring the identity of users of software, especially on apps running on smart phones.

Proposed Solution

1. Create a structure of a json identifier token that is:
   1. not dependant on the underlying transport media for any integrity.
   2. able to contain parts that come from different attestation authorities (i.e. that are signed by different keys).
2. Enable users to create their own high assurance identifier tokens. (aka self-issued, or self-sovereign identifiers.)
3. Enable federations to create their own specific measures of what factors are needed to meet their environment. They may choose whether to implement centralized, decentralized or distributed means for attesting to the assurance levels that they have specified.
4. Create an infrastructure that can be implemented by federation authorities to certify that users have the ability to meet the high assurance requirements of NIST 800-63-3,