14 DESIGN 3 Establish a trusted—unique, secure, and accurate—identity. • Uniqueness. An identification system provides a mechanism to establish and authenticate a unique identity when—within that system—each person has only one identity and no two people share the same identity. Uniqueness is particularly important within legal identification systems and others that support use cases requiring high levels of assurance,15 such as government-to-person (G2P) payments and voting. Importantly, uniqueness within a given system does not imply that there must be only one identity provider or system or a single permanent identifier (e.g., a unique ID number) used for all purposes in a country or jurisdiction. • Security. Identification systems must have adequate and effective safeguards against unauthorized access, tampering (alteration or other unauthorized changes to data or credentials), identity theft, misuse of data, cybercrime, and other threats occurring throughout the identification life cycle. Data must be protected at rest and in transit, including when people use their credentials, or including on personal devices. Security measures must include systems to raise awareness about safe utilization of the system and to notify data subjects in the case of data breaches, as well as recourse for identities that have been stolen or compromised and need to be reissued. • Accuracy. Ensuring that identity data are accurate and up-to-date is one of the core principles of data protection and a right of data subjects, and is also essential for the trustworthiness of the system. Identification systems should be designed to ensure accurate data collection and have userfriendly procedures for people to view and update their data and correct errors to ensure accuracy over time. 15 Generally speaking, a “level of assurance” (LOA) represents the amount of trust a given identification system or credential provides to a third party that an identity claimed by a person or entity is actually their “true” identity. This is a function of multiple factors, including the strength of the identity proofing process when people are enrolled in an identification system and issued credentials (the identity assurance level or IAL), the strength of the authentication process and technology (authentication assurance level or AAL), and—if using a federated model—the assertion protocol used by the federation to communicate authentication and attribute information (federation assurance level or FAL) (adapted from NIST 800-63:2017).