Identity assurance
Identity assurance in the context of federated identity management is the ability for a party to determine, with some level of certainty, that an electronic credential representing an entity (human or a machine) with which it interacts to effect a transaction, can be trusted to actually belong to the entity. In the case where the entity is a person, identity assurance is the level at which the credential being presented can be trusted to be a proxy for the individual to whom it was issued and not someone else.