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Forms of Electronic Signature TechnologyFiled Under: General

In an E-Business environment and networked economy, the terms of authentication and identification of parties are vital elements of functionality, operability and security. We should also underline the distinction between authentication and identification.

Authentication refers to the authentication or verification of a claimed identity. In other words, the user wishes to log on to a network or service, or undertake an online transaction and claims to be a certain person. The authentication process seeks to verify this claim via the provision of a characteristic (PIN/password/token/biometrics or other information), or multiple characteristics, known to be associated with the claimed identity. There is therefore a one-to-one matching process involved, as the characteristic in question is matched against the reference associated with the claimed identity, according to predefined threshold criteria in the case of biometrics.

Identification seeks to identify a user from within a population of possible users, according to a characteristic, or multiple characteristics that can be reliably associated with a particular individual, without an identity being explicitly claimed by the user. There is therefore a one-to-many matching process involved against a database of relevant data. We should perhaps make a further distinction between identifying an individual from within a known population using relevant characteristics (PIN/password/token/ biometrics, etc.) and seeking to identify an individual via connectivity address information. In the latter case, we may correctly identify an address and the name that is registered
in association with it, but that does not necessarily guarantee that the same individual undertook a specific transaction (unless robust biometrics have been used across multiple processes).

Taken From : Digital Economy – Impacts, Influences and Challenges