Tag Archives: identity verification

How Other Experts Refer to “Somewhat You Why”

Unlike most other posts that appear under my name—Bredebot posts are another matter—this post breaks my 2023 rule because most of it was written by Google Gemini, not me.

But I figured that if I wrote a book specifically about SIX factors of authentication…

Four pages from "Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication" by John E. Bredehoft, Bredemarket. Click on the image to purchase.
The book.

…it would be nice to know if other experts held similar thoughts.

My prompt to Gemini

Bredemarket has promoted “somewhat you why” as a sixth factor of identity verification / authentication. Has anyone else shared similar observations?

Gemini’s response

Here is the short answer: Yes, industry experts and security frameworks strongly agree with the core observation, though they call it “Authentication Intent,” “Intent Verification,” or “Context-Aware/Risk-Based Authentication” rather than using Bredemarket’s play-on-words.

Shifting Truths. Google Lyria. Public Domain.

John Bredehoft (Bredemarket) coined “somewhat you why” to fit the traditional naming convention (something you know, have, are, do, somewhere you are). His argument is that checking why an action or request is taking place—evaluating intent, transaction risk, or reasonableness—functions as a crucial safeguard, especially in an era of deepfakes and automated AI agents.

While the tongue-in-cheek name is unique to Bredemarket, the concept itself is widely discussed and implemented across the cybersecurity industry under three main paradigms:

1. “Authentication Intent” (NIST Standards)

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) explicitly addresses intent in NIST SP 800-63B.

  • The Problem: A user might have a valid session token, biometrics, or physical key plugged in, but malware or a session hijack could trigger actions without the user’s conscious decision.
  • The Solution: Systems require an explicit act of intent—like tapping a physical FIDO key, typing a PIN, or responding to a contextual prompt—proving that the user intended to execute that specific action at that moment.

2. Intent Verification for AI & Delegated Actions

With the rise of autonomous AI agents and automated workflows, identity security groups (like the Non-Human Identity/NHI movement) frequently discuss Intent Verification.

  • Conventional authentication proves who logged in, but not whether the user meant to perform this specific action.
  • Intent Verification bridges authentication and authorization by evaluating whether a transaction (e.g., a $35M wire transfer or an API call) aligns with the user’s actual current decision and business policy.

3. Context-Aware and Adaptive Authentication

Identity providers (like Palo Alto Networks, Okta, and Silverfort) build their Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication (AMFA) around the “why” and “context”:

  • Context Signals: What resource is being accessed? Is this normal business behavior? Does this request make sense given the time, value, and sensitivity?
  • Dynamic Step-Up: If the “why” seems low-risk (e.g., checking internal docs during work hours), access is smooth. If the “why” is high-risk or suspicious (e.g., a wire transfer requested via video call), the system demands step-up verification.

How the Views Compare

While most identity security professionals treat “intent and context” as a governance or risk engine layer wrapping traditional factors rather than a 6th factor itself, everyone agrees with Bredemarket’s baseline premise: verifying who someone is without evaluating what and why they are trying to do it is no longer enough to stop modern fraud.


From https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/3-takeaways-from-start-with-why.

Even Jedis Can Face Ephemeral Challenges

From a recent Identity Jedi post.

“NHI visibility and AI agent visibility feel like the same problem. They’re not. A service account is relatively static. It was created for a purpose, it has credentials, it authenticates to something. You can find it, document it, rotate its credentials, put it in a vault. That’s a solvable problem with existing tooling.

“An AI agent is different in almost every dimension that matters. It’s dynamic. It’s often ephemeral. It doesn’t have a fixed identity. It borrows one, or several. It makes decisions at runtime about what it needs to access. And it operates at machine speed, which means by the time your SIEM fires an alert, the transaction is already done.”

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.

Proof of Humanity Does Not Prove Identity

If you have a database of people worldwide, you can use irises to see whether someone is in the database or not.

This lets you buy the world a Coke. One per person.

But it doesn’t tell you WHO they are.

For that you need to test them against the factors of identity verification and authentication.

All six of them.

Learn more. Purchase the ebook.

Four pages from "Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication" by John E. Bredehoft, Bredemarket. Click on the image to purchase.
Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication.

Factors Are Independent

One important thing about factors is that they are independent of each other.

The fact that a person has a particular password bears no relation to the fact that a person has a particular fingerprint ridge structure.

And even modalities within a factor may be independent of each other. When Motorola sold its Biometric Business Unit to Safran in 2009, I joined a company (MorphoTrak) that promoted three biometric modalities: finger, face, and iris. While all three biometrics came from the same person, there was no relationship between any of them. Knowing a person’s right forefinger did not tell you what the person’s iris was like. (But beware: driver’s licenses and passports share information, such as dates of birth.)

If you have a critical security issue, you don’t want to depend upon just one factor, or one modality.

Double or triple them up by requiring multiple identity verifications and authentications with unrelated modalities and factors.

Learn more about the six identity factors

Six identity factors. One Bredemarket ebook. Total identity protection. Purchase “Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication.”

Four pages from "Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication" by John E. Bredehoft, Bredemarket., Click on the image to purchase.

Why Are Identity Verification and Authentication Critically Important?

Imagine if we didn’t have identity verification and authentication.

I could walk into a luxury car dealership and buy a car, telling the salesperson that my name is Bill Gates. I could buy the car, and Gates would get the bill.

Sounds great…until someone impersonates YOU and gets YOUR money.

Learn more about the six identity factors

Six identity factors. One Bredemarket ebook. Total identity protection. Purchase “Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication.”

Four pages from "Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication" by John E. Bredehoft, Bredemarket., Click on the image to purchase.

Identifying Non-Human Identities with SPIFFE and SPIRE

I once tried to see if non-human identities could verify and authenticate with the six human factors. (Yeah, six. Watch for the book.)

Definitions

In reality, non-human identities use entirely different authentication methods…with their own acronyms. For example:

  • SPIFFE is the Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone.
  • SPIRE is the SPIFFE Runtime Environment.

So what are SPIFFE and SPIRE?

“SPIFFE and SPIRE provide strongly attested, cryptographic identities to workloads across a wide variety of platforms”

That wide variety of platforms is distributed.

“SPIFFE and SPIRE provide a uniform identity control plane across modern and heterogeneous infrastructure. Since software and application architectures have grown substantially, they are spread across virtual machines in public clouds and private data centers.”

Distinguishing between the two, the SPIFFE Project “defines a framework and set of standards for identifying and securing communications between application services, while the runtime environment SPIRE “is a toolchain of APIs for establishing trust between software systems across a wide variety of hosting platforms.”

Benefits

Forget all that. Let’s get to the benefits.

Enable defense in depth: Provide strongly attested identities to reduce the likelihood of breach through credential comprise

Reduce operational complexity: Consistent, automated management of identity reduces the burden of devops teams

Interoperability: Simplifies the technical aspects of full interoperability across multiple stacks

Compliance and auditability: Enables mutually authenticated TLS and multiple roots of trust to meet regulatory requirements

Use at Uber

But does anyone use it? Yes. Take Uber:

“We use SPIRE at Uber to provide identity to workloads running in multiple clouds (GCP, OCI, AWS, on-premise) for a variety of jobs, including stateless services, stateful storage, batch and streaming jobs, CI jobs, workflow executions, infrastructure services, and more. We have worked with the open source community since the early stages of the project in mid-2018 to address production readiness and scalability concerns.”

More here.

Now this is admittedly a whole new world for me, far afield from the usual 12345 and gummy arguments where I usually reside. But since bots will soon outnumber people (if they don’t already), we had all better learn it.

What About the Data Labelers Themselves?

Earlier this month I discussed a class action lawsuit, originated in the United States, from people who believe their privacy is being violated by the use of Kenyan data labelers to view their video output.

And the data labelers themselves are not happy, according to a 404 Media article “AI is African Intelligence.”

Before I get to the Kenyans, let’s talk about the reality of AI. No, AI output is not 100% generated by computers alone. There is often human review.

In some cases human review is understandable. There was a recent brouhaha when it was publicly highlighted that when a Waymo vehicle runs into a problematic situation, Waymo calls upon a human reviewer to intervene. People’s anger about this is pointless: would they prefer that Waymo NOT call upon a human reviewer, and just let the car do whatever?

Back to Kenya and the Data Labelers Association (DLA) reports of what data labelers actually do.

“Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift, he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots, sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States. His boss was an algorithm that told him to flit in and out of different personas.”

I’ve previously seen reports about people in the U.S. reviewing shocking material for social media companies, but it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to outsource the work abroad.

Unless the U.S. Government insists on bringing data labeling work to the United States, in the same way that it wants to bring call center jobs back here.

I do offer one caution: there is a lot of data labeling work that is NOT pornographic. In the identity verification industry, data labelers review real and fake faces, real and fake documents, and the like to train AI models. Such work does not have the emotional stress that you get from watching certain videos.

But it’s still hard work.