NIST's National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has released a new draft report, NIST Interagency or Internal Report (NISTIR) 8335, Identity as a Service for Public Safety Organizations.

Identity as a service (IDaaS) is when a company offers identity, credential, and access management (ICAM) services to customers through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud-service model. Public safety organizations (PSOs) could potentially reduce costs and adopt new standards and authenticators more easily by using IDaaS to provide authentication services for their own applications. This would allow PSOs to offload some or most of their authentication responsibilities to the IDaaS provider.

This report informs PSOs about IDaaS and how they can benefit from it. It also lists questions that PSOs can ask IDaaS providers when evaluating their services to ensure the PSOs’ authentication needs are met and the risk associated with authentication is mitigated properly. PSOs considering IDaaS usage are encouraged to use this NISTIR. This report was developed in joint partnership between the NCCoE and the Public Safety Communications Research Division (PSCR) at NIST.

The public comment period for this draft is open through August 2, 2021. See the publication details for a copy of the draft and instructions for submitting comments. You can also contact us at psfr-nccoe@nist.gov.

NOTE: A call for patent claims is included on page iii of this draft. For additional information, see the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) Patent Policy--Inclusion of Patents in ITL Publications.