ID Verification is double-checking that a person’s actual identity is the same as their claimed one. It is a step above identification but below authentication.
It becomes crucial when dealing with people or other factors that increase the probability of fraud on the web. Identity verification is a standard safety measure whether you’re opening a bank account or filing your taxes with the IRS.
Identity Verification can be done in various ways. In this article, we’ll look at five more prevalent ones today.
1. Two-Factor Authentication
In addition to a username and password, two-factor authentication typically necessitates the presence of a second piece of identifying information or token. Users should have a physical token (such as a code they have memorized) or something they can access in memory (like a smartphone app) that they have acquired from the authenticating agency. Having to use a token effectively prevents fraudulent transactions.
Account creation and password reset are two situations where two-factor authentication shines. Users must have their smartphones on them if they choose to use this technique during the authentication procedure.
The cornerstone of a zero-trust security architecture is two-factor authentication (2FA). To prevent unauthorized access, it’s essential to check the identities of those requesting access to private information. Phishing, brute-force attacks, credential exploitation, and other similar security risks all target user passwords and accounts, but 2FA helps to prevent these assaults.
For example, suppose you use a username and password for a program’s first layer of authentication. Those details are transmitted online (your primary network). You’ll need to switch to an alternative (out-of-band) channel for the second part. Approval of a push notification delivered over your mobile network is an out-of-band authentication.
If you are also planning to install two-factor authentication to prevent fake account and stop fraud, do consider authenticate.com. With their help, you can successfully run a process to authenticate identity. They have years of experience while serving brands like AWS, Shopify, Datadog, and many more.
2. Knowledge-Based Authentication
Through secret questions and answers, knowledge-based authentication (KBA) ensures that only the intended user has access.
The answers to these questions are needed to be simple for that person to provide but challenging for everyone else. Another safety measure for KBA is a time limit for answering the questions. KBA’s main benefit is that it is the simplest verification method to grasp for end users. The major drawback is that the answers are becoming increasingly accessible to discover through social networking and other, more traditional social engineering techniques.
Static KBA and dynamic KBA are two typical varieties of knowledge-based authentication.
When creating a profile or system that requires a password, users can choose “static knowledge-based authentication,” in which they are asked to answer security questions. Their replies may be required later when they reset their password or verify their identity.
In contrast, dynamic KBA employs data mining technologies to pose queries to users that IT systems already know the answers to. Due to the difficulties of implementing reliable dynamic KBA, many organizations have opted to adopt static KBA. Knowledge-based authentication is commonly employed as part of multi-factor authentication alongside other security procedures like IP checking.
3. Credit Bureau-Based Authentication
One type of authentication relies on data maintained by credit reporting agencies. Credit information, such as customers’ names, addresses, and SSNs, is stored in vast quantities by these businesses. Scores are used in credit-based authentication to find a perfect match without affecting the user.
Users with thin credit files, such as young people and new immigrants, may not be able to find a good match.
4. Database Methods
Relationship between a collection of data values (the inputs) and a set of result values (the outputs) when the first input value (the subject argument) is of the same type as the subject type (the parameter) of the method.
For instance, the ADDRESS type’s CITY method accepts VARCHAR values as input and returns an ADDRESS (or a subtype of ADDRESS).
The definition of a user-defined structured type includes the implicit or explicit description of associated methods. For every structured type, methods are implicitly defined. For every property of the structured type, corresponding observer methods are defined.
Applications can retrieve the value of an attribute for an instance of the type using the type’s Observer methods. Additional mutator methods are defined for each attribute, allowing applications to alter the type instance by modifying the value of an attribute. A mutator method for the ADDRESS type is the CITY operation, which was previously defined.
Verifying someone’s identification via a database ID approach involves gathering information from various resources. These include both online social media databases and traditional offline sources. Since database technologies drastically reduce the need for manual reviews, they are frequently utilized to determine a user’s potential threat.
One major drawback of these approaches is that they cannot guarantee that the person supplying the information is the one completing the transaction, which is a major problem in today’s world, where fake online identities are so easy to create.
5. Online Verification
Various methods, such as AI, biometrics, computer vision, and human review, are used in online ID verification to ascertain whether or not the presented government-issued id is that of the user. It is common practice for this verification method to ask users to upload a photo of themselves holding an ID, which verifies that the person pictured on the ID is the same in the photo.
Despite the security benefits of online verification, some users may find the requirement to upload a photo of themselves together with a government-issued ID to be intrusive or unpleasant.
Final Thought
There are benefits and drawbacks to using various methods to verify an individual’s identification. A company must implement strategies that appeal to the specific demographics that make up its clientele. Banks and other financial institutions are urged to implement the most secure identity verification mechanism possible, and in certain situations, multiple methods, to reduce the likelihood of money laundering.
