Big Data: A Great Way to Ensure Strong Authentication Posted on : May 02 - 2016

Whether it’s a notorious hacker in Russia or a high school kid in New York filing fraudulent claims, fraudsters are everywhere. And, they are getting stronger day by day. The old school passwords you have been using throughout these years are no longer safe to protect your digital identities. Especially, when it comes to the internet, technology advances act like a two-way street, one is for the people who use the internet in a good manner, another is for the fraudsters who use the technology to extract personally recognizable information from thousands of vulnerable servers.

However, technological advances like Big Data have created new possibilities to protect your identities. Several two-factor authentication (2FA) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) solutions have been offered by different vendors and solution providers to enhance your account security. Those solutions use your unique identities like your fingerprints, retina scans, your behavior and knowledge to verify you as an authentic user. And the best parts of these solutions are that they are not adverse and provide completely safe user experience without any complexity.

CHALLENGE QUESTIONS:

It’s a very easy and safe method to identify any fraud user, mostly used by some of the email services. To identify that you are an authentic user, some secret questions will be asked of you that have been previously selected and answered by you. As an end user, you are the one who is supposed to answer them correctly and by doing so the system will ensure whether you are an authentic user or not.

OUT-OF-BAND (OOB) AUTHENTICATION:

It’s a type of two-factor authentication widely used in financial institutions like banks and other organizations that require high security. This method requires a secondary verification method through a different channel. For instance, the user may have to call from a registered number and respond to an automatically generated phone call from the institution for authentication. Voiceprint technology could be used for further security or some auto generated code could be sent to the user’s number for further verification.

KNOWLEDGE-BASED AUTHENTICATION (KBA):

KBA looks to prove the identity of someone providing information to access a service like financial institution or websites. It will verify the user by asking some out of wallet questions that are picked up in real time from a series of private and public database. Note that, the answers to these questions are only known by the end users, so it will help KBA to recognize whether the person providing the identity information is really the owner of the identity or not. It’s a very sophisticated authentication process to keep the information in the right hands.

BIOMETRICS:

This authentication process refers to human characteristics. You may already know that our fingerprints and retina are quite unique. So, they can be used to identify the user. This realistic authentication is widely used in computer science as a form of access control. Also, integrating the transaction singing with biometrics as an option can be a stronger means of authentication.

ANALYTICS AND BEHAVIOR-BASED AUTHENTICATION:

It’s a continuous authentication process that involves gathering data on users by analyzing their behavioral patterns such as how they hold their device, typing speed, touch points. Even after they pass the traditional security measures like passwords, this process continues its work. Recently, the leader in mobile industry, TeleSign, has released a new SDK named Behavior ID that helps analyze a user’s behavioral biometrics by enabling the mobile and web apps.

In recent years, Big Data has become an inseparable part of the technology for security purpose. It plays a vital role to keep you safe and prevent fraudsters and cybercriminals by securing your identity while avoiding the complexity you faced with your traditional passwords. Source