Authentication Credential

Overview

An authentication credential is information or a device that a system accepts as evidence of identity. Examples include passwords, one-time codes, private keys, hardware security keys, client certificates, biometric templates, API secrets, and signed access tokens.

Credentials differ in resistance to phishing, replay, theft, guessing, duplication, and remote attack. Their security also depends on enrollment, storage, transmission, verification, recovery, rotation, expiration, and revocation rather than only the credential format itself.

Organizations should avoid shared credentials, use least privilege, protect secrets with suitable hardware or secret managers, and monitor unexpected use. Compromise response must revoke affected sessions and dependent credentials, not simply change one password while leaving active access intact.

Communication about Authentication Credential should separate confirmed facts, working hypotheses, assumptions, unknowns, and decisions.

An authentication credential is secret or cryptographic evidence used to prove an identity, such as a password, key, certificate, or token. A credential proves identity only while its lifecycle and use remain protected against theft, replay, sharing, recovery abuse, and unauthorized persistence.

For Authentication Credential, the trust decision should establish secret or cryptographic evidence used to prove an identity, such as a password, key, certificate, or token and bind the result to the requested action and protected resource. Teams should test issuance, storage, validation, expiry, revocation, recovery, and privileged override for identity proof and credential state, rather than checking only a successful request. Logs concerning the Authentication Credential context and identity proof and credential state should support investigation without exposing reusable secrets or unnecessary personal data.

Review of Authentication Credential should compare permitted and rejected actions related to identity proof and credential state, confirm that recovery cannot bypass the primary safeguard, and remove obsolete access promptly.