This paper considers the problem of estimating the parameters of an autoregressive (AR) process in presence of additive white noise and proposes a new identification method, based on theoretical results originally developed in errors-in-variables contexts. This approach allows to estimate the AR parameters, the driving noise variance and the variance of the additive noise in a congruent way in that these estimates assure the positive definiteness of the autocorrelation matrix. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with that of bias-compensated least-squares methods by means fo Monte Carlo simulations. The results show the effectivenesss of the new method also in presence of high amounts of noise.