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Compare by how confident you need to be that someone is who they claim to be

Last updated on November 24, 2022

The ID services you can use will depend on the identity assurance level you need for your service. You need to determine how secure your service needs to be and how to adequately protect personal information in your service.

The levels

The level is about how sure you need to be that you have the right individual, organization or device. In other terms, it refers to the difficulty one would have trying to use someone else’s account to access a service.

Identity Assurance Levels

Level 3: High confidence

Use when you need a high level of confidence of a person’s identity and that their identity information is verified. For example, when your service has sensitive or confidential information.

Level 2: Some confidence 

Use when you only need some confidence. For example, when someone obtains a business or fishing licence.

Level 1: Little to no confidence

Only use when you need little confidence of a person’s identity and there is no requirement to link the person to a specific real-life identity. Since no verification is required, any information provided by the individual should be treated as self-asserted.

Read more about this:

 

ID services by level of assurance

Some ID services provide more confidence in who the user is.

Options by Identity Assurance Level
ID service Identity Assurance Level

BC Services Card Account

 Level 3

IDIR

 Level 2
Business BCeID Level 2 (business info)
Level 1 (person info for who is representing business)

Basic BCeID

 Level 1

Microsoft guest account

 Level 1

GitHub account

 Level 1

Digital credentials

 Varies by credential
Federated accounts

Varies by organization

How it's determined

Assurance levels depend on the strength of the Identity proofing process and the types of credentials and authentication mechanisms used during a transaction.

For identity proofing, the level of assurance depends on the:

  • Method of identification
  • The attributes collected
  • The degree of certainty with which those attributes are verified (e.g., through cross-checks and deduplication)

For authentication, the level of assurance depends on the:

  • Type of credential(s)
  • The number of authentication factors used (i.e., one vs. multiple)
  • The cryptographic strength of the transaction

 

Other ways to compare ID services

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