Digital identity and assurance levels
All AmbiSecure engineering content tagged Identity, newest first. Newer entries reflect current thinking; earlier entries come from the engineering archive.
Digital identity is the binding between a real-world entity — a person, device, or service — and the credentials that authenticate it. Strong identity depends on where the authenticating secret lives and how it is proven: a key in tamper-resistant hardware, exercised through a phishing-resistant protocol, is far stronger than a shared secret in software.
This category collects writing on identity architecture across people and devices: credential lifecycle, hardware-bound authentication, and device identity for IoT and connected products. The unifying idea is that trustworthy identity is rooted in hardware and proven cryptographically, not asserted by a password.
Frequently asked questions
What makes a digital identity strong?
A non-exportable key in a secure element, bound to the correct origin or relying party and exercised through a phishing-resistant protocol, so the credential cannot be phished, replayed, or cloned.
How is device identity different from user identity?
Device identity authenticates a thing (via an attestation or device key in a secure element) rather than a person; both rely on hardware-held keys, but device identity is provisioned at manufacture and used for machine-to-machine trust.
What is credential lifecycle management?
It is the end-to-end handling of a credential — enrolment, issuance, renewal, and revocation — which must be governed carefully because a credential is only as trustworthy as its issuance and revocation process.
What is an assurance level?
A graded statement of how much confidence an authentication event deserves, defined in frameworks such as NIST SP 800-63. It determines which factor combinations a relying party will accept for a given operation.
Why separate authentication from authorisation?
Authentication establishes who is present; authorisation decides what they may do. Conflating them leads to systems where proving identity once silently grants everything.