Non-Human Identity Verification

How do you verify non-human identities?

One of the reasons that I titled my ebook “Proving Humanity” is because the six (yes, six) factors of identity verification and authentication that I discuss only apply to identifying humans, and do not apply to non-human identities.

Again, so how do you verify non-human identities?

Cryptographics

One way is via cryptographics. As I discussed previously, the Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone (SPIFFE) and the SPIFFE Runtime Environment (SPIRE) provide non-person entities with “strongly attested, cryptographic identities.”

Problem solved, right?

As any human who has used a password knows, a single factor can be stolen. And that includes cryptographic factors.

Provenance

Which means that we have to look at provenance. But instead of looking at the provenance of an AI-generated image or video, we are looking at the provenance of an agent that performs actions. The network origin. The environment. The associated attributes. Is the agent running on a specific, authorized, and known virtual machine or container at a specific network address, or is it running…somewhere else?

Behavior

And if you’ve read my book, you know that human identities can be evaluated based upon their behavior (either tendencies or intent). You can also look at the behavior of agents. Is the agent acting at an unexpected time of day? Is it executing an unusually high volume of requests? Is it “scoping out the joint”?

Multi-factor authentication

Again, it’s possible to spoof one factor, but much harder to spoof multiple factors. And that applies to both humans and non-human agents.

Be safe out there.