August 22, 2019
Protecting your digital identity is not just reserved for the cast of a first grade hacking movie, and being able to authenticate your proof of ownership is not just for those that are trading in crypto currency. In our modern tech-savvy world with interconnected devices, we should all pay a little more attention to protecting ourselves from identity fraud.
Identity theft is also not only reserved for those that are digitally savvy. It happens on a daily basis. Even to people using Facebook. Your profile is cloned, and unsuspecting friends are talking to a stranger who could potentially be asking them questions and putting your personal information at risk.
Over time society has developed many authentication factors, such as personal identification numbers e.g. ID numbers, passports, and other types of ID. These analog forms of identification allow even strangers to authenticate one another.
That brings us to the digital age, in which problems with traditional authentication methods have been amplified. Online, you can interact with countless strangers around the world without knowing or seeing them. Thus, figuring out if they really are who they claim to be has become even more important.
If your business deals with highly classified information - for example be it governments who are protecting political refugees, our Intelligence Agency cracking down on smugglers, a food & beverage company protecting the world's top soda or your favourite fried chicken recipe; or even your HR department needing to protect your personal information such as your bank details etc - You need to trust that your information will not be leaked. That only specific and authorised people have access to your information, and it is not easy to access if you’re not them, ie identity authentication.
As the technologies used to digitally authenticate people over the decades have advanced, so too have the techniques attackers find to trick or bypass digital authentication.
There are many different methods to authenticate someone, depending on what it is you’re protecting, including biometrics, device identity and behavior pattern analysis options.
Biometric solutions used to be quite expensive and only top, multinational corporations had the capital to invest in such equipment. As they have become more mainstream (even your smartphone has a fingerprint scanner now) they have made it more accessible to everyone.
Biometric authentication remains one of the best methods to prove identity because it can't be replicated easily. No matter what those Bond movies may portray. Biometric devices include a Trusted Execution Environment, noted ITProPortal, which separates the handling of biometric information from the device’s operating system. This makes it nearly impossible for hackers to manipulate the authentication process, as they don’t have a way of using malware and other viruses.
As we continue to move more and more into this digital world the adoption of stronger authentication solutions that keep all transactions safe, your identity secure and is convenient enough for everyone to use, will only accelerate over the next few years.
BioGate is one of our top products for identity validation. It uses multiple sources of biometric and demographic data for real-time authentication. Using BioGate will enable organizations to benefit from a world leading authentication architecture that can function as the core-processing platform for every type of identity validation across multiple delivery channels.
