What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on A.3.23 Secure authentication?

Secure authentication capabilities offered for customer-controlled accounts and evidence customers can enable them; Authentication configuration on the organization's own accounts on PII systems; Contract or service description recording the capability.

What is the most common gap auditors find on A.3.23?

Customer accounts limited to password-only log-on with no stronger option

ISO/IEC 27701:2025 · Annex A Table A.3 information security controls with PII-specific guidance

`A.3.23` Secure authentication

When a customer asks for it, the organization shall offer a secure sign-in capability for the user accounts that the customer administers, alongside the secure authentication it applies to its own accounts on PII-processing systems.

Source: ISO/IEC 27701:2025, A.3.23. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open ISO/IEC 27701:2025 in the compliance library.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

moderate

to go live

Identity provider / directory

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

Authentication configuration on the organization's own accounts on PII systems · Identity provider / directory

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Secure authentication capabilities offered for customer-controlled accounts and evidence customers can enable them · Identity provider / directory

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Contract or service description recording the capability · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Start with the 1 of 3 artefacts that already live in a system (Identity provider / directory); keep the periodic reviews but log each one as a dated record with a named reviewer.

Common gaps auditors find

Customer accounts limited to password-only log-on with no stronger option
Capability available but undocumented, so customers do not know to ask

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

A.3.22 User endpoint devices · A.3.24 Information backup