I was talking with government identity strategists earlier this week. We were circling (yet again) definitions of identity and attributes, and revisiting the reasonable idea that digital identities are “unique in a context”. Regular readers will know I’m very interested in context. But in the same session we were discussing the public’s understandable anxiety about national ID schemes. And I had a little epiphany that the word “unique” and the very idea of it may be unhelpful. I wonder if we could avoid using the word “uniqueness” wherever we can.
The link from uniqueness to troublesome national identity is not just perception; there is a real tendency for identity and access management (IDAM) systems to over-identify, with an obvious privacy penatly. Security professionals feel instinctively that they more they know about people, the more secure we all will be.
Whenever we think uniqueness is important, I wonder if there are really other more precise objectives that apply? Is “singularity” a better word for the property we’re looking for? Or the mouthful “non-ambiguity”? In different use cases, what we really need to know can vary:
I observe that when IDAM schemes come loaded with reference to uniqueness, it’s tends to bias the way RPs do their identification and risk management designs. There is an expectation that uniqueness is important no matter what. Yet it is emerging that much fraud (most fraud?) exploits weaknesses at transaction time, not enrollment time: even if you are identified uniquely, you can still get defrauded by an attacker who takes over or bypasses your authenticator. So uniqueness in and of itself doesn’t always help.
If people do want to use the word “unique” then they should have the discipline to always qualify it, as mentioned, as “unique in a context”. But I have to say that “unique is a context” is not “unique”.
Finally it’s worth remembering that the word has long been degraded by the biometrics industry with their habit of calling most any biological trait “unique”. There’s a sad lack of precision here. No biometric as measured is ever unique! Every mode, even iris, has a non zero False Match Rate.
What’s in a word? A lot! I’d like to see more rigorous use of the word “unique”. At least let’s be aware of what it means subliminally to the people we’re talking with – be they technical or otherwise. With the word bandied around so much, engineers can tend to think uniqueness is always a designed objective, and laypeople can presume that every authentication scheme is out to fingerprint them. Literally.