A Modern Approach to Authentication for Modern Times – Simple, Accurate & Frictionless

With the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) revealing that it received 3.6 million identity theft and fraud reports in 2020 – up from 2.4 million in 2019 – organizations are realizing that yesterday’s user authentication tools no longer suffice. And because organizations face these fraud challenges while pursuing digital transformations, it’s increasingly clear that their identity and access management (IAM) strategies must both:

• • Implement better authentication technologies
  • Prioritize cloud-based solutions

The first point on modernization is driven by user experience. Negative user experiences, in fact, remain the top obstacles to MFA adoption, followed by its complexity and costs. The newer tools and technologies on the market today seek to improve UX by avoiding friction-generating multi-factor authentication (MFA) steps such as SMS push, knowledge-based questions, and CAPTCHAs – steps that offer questionable security while irritating and alienating customers and employees.

On the other side of digital transformation, is the Cloud. According to a Forrester study conducted in conjunction with ForgeRock and Google, more than four of five global IT decision-makers say their organization has already adopted cloud-based IAM, or plans to adopt or expand it over the next two years – including building behavioral biometrics profiles for users as part of their cloud-based IAM roadmap.

Yet, existing attempts to deliver value with behavioral biometrics in a SaaS-based format have been lacking because:

• • Inputs are limited in terms of signal capture (e.g. just keystroke data) as well as data collection scope (e.g. web only).
• • Solutions have focused on page navigation and other anomalies against population norms rather than positive verification of actual human users.
• • Outputs have been difficult to interpret and integrate into existing verification flows.
• • As a result, organizations have instead addressed authentication security challenges with a range of technologies that openly challenge users to prove they are themselves, often resulting in costly support and frustrating experiences.

Given these challenges, BehavioSec is unveiling a new, SaaS-based, simple-to-use, and frictionless version of our proven BehavioSense platform. It is the market’s first solution to offer comprehensive behavioral biometrics insights for MFA from the Cloud that meets these challenges because:

• • Our platform offers a frictionless experience – there are no user-facing challenges or training regimen.
• • User profiles are based on individuals rather than populations, and their unique typing patterns, touchscreen keystrokes and gestures, mouse movements, mobile device orientation, etc.
• • User authentication experience is “invisible” or “transparent” with the option to avoid passwords and other tedious challenge steps.
• • Our software development kit (SDK) integrates via a few simple lines of code, enabling immediate collection and scoring of user behavior and device interaction data.
• • We manage our SaaS platform to ensure optimal scalability, redundancy, uptime, and service-level agreements (SLA). Customer organizations never have to deploy, operate, or scale any infrastructure – ever.
• • Instead of overloading our customers with data, we present results in a highly streamlined and accessible manner. In attempting to arrive at a definitive answer to the “Are you really you?” user authentication question, we analyze the data to provide a simple “risk score” that gives our customers an automatic, clear “yes/no” response as to whether to allow access to the user in question.
• • Our SaaS platform also works with devices across the board – building its user profiles from not only insights generated from web interfacing and keyboard typing, but from across-the-board interaction with mobile device sensors.

At BehavioSec, we understand how companies struggle to reduce the risk of fraud, identity theft and security compromises while attempting to establish new digital capabilities and services in the interest of ideal customer and user experiences. This is why we are convinced that our frictionless behavioral biometrics platform – where users are never asked to do anything during an interaction that they don’t intend or want to do – will emerge as the top cloud offering of its kind. If you’d like to know more about how we can help your organization, then please contact us.

 

The post A Modern Approach to Authentication for Modern Times – Simple, Accurate & Frictionless appeared first on BehavioSec.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from BehavioSec authored by Jordan Blake. Read the original post at: https://www.behaviosec.com/a-modern-approach-to-authentication-for-modern-times-simple-accurate-frictionless/