NIST announces the release of NIST Interagency Report (IR) 7849, A Methodology for Developing Authentication Assurance Level Taxonomy for Smart Card-based Identity Verification. Smart cards (smart identity tokens) are now extensively deployed for identity verification, and are used in controlling access to both IT and physical resources. This publication presents a methodology for assigning authentication strengths based on the strength of pair wise bindings between the five entities involved in smart card based authentications – the card (token), the token secret, the card holder, the card issuer, and the person identifier stored in the card. NISTIR 7849 also illustrates how to use the methodology for developing an authentication assurance level taxonomy for two real-world smart identity token deployments.