What is Liveness Verification, and What are the benefits?

What is Liveness Verification, and What are the Benefits?

Liveness Verification isn't just something rules say you have to do; it's key to keeping customers safe. As fraudsters get better at getting past security, companies need to keep updating how they check who people are. Luckily, improvements like liveness detection have made checking identities with selfies much better, turning it into a strong way to protect people's online identities.

What is Liveness Verification?

Liveness verification is an easy but secure way to check who someone is. It asks users to take a selfie, and sometimes more selfies or videos, to prove it's really them. This might involve doing different poses or actions to make the check stronger, fight against fake photos, and stop other tricky scams. More and more, using videos for verification is getting popular because it offers even better security.

Understanding Liveness Detection

What makes selfie checks really work is the ability to tell if someone is actually there and alive when they take a selfie. This is called liveness detection. It uses smart technology to tell the difference between a real person and a picture or video of a person. It looks at the details in the photo, image data, metadata, and signs that the person is alive, like blinking or the pupils getting bigger or smaller. Sometimes, it might even ask people to do something specific when taking their selfie to make sure they are real. This helps confirm that the person is genuinely present and not just a fake image.

How Does Liveness Verification Benefit Security

Liveness verification serves as a crucial second layer on top of traditional verification methods like document and database checks. This multi-layered approach addresses several key challenges:

• Protection Against Data Breaches: With sensitive information increasingly at risk of theft, selfie verification with liveness detection adds an essential layer of security that is difficult to circumvent for hackers who have gotten hold of a user’s sensitive personal details or official ID.
• Low-friction Reverification: For actions requiring heightened security, such as logging in or initiating high-risk transactions, selfie checks offer a user-friendly method to re-verify identity without the tedium of rescanning IDs or re-entering sensitive data.

Is Selfie Verification unbeatable?

Even though selfie checks are useful, they're not perfect. Sometimes, the technology that recognizes faces can make mistakes, like not recognizing the right person. Also, fake videos and photos made by computers (deepfakes) can trick even the best selfie check systems. This shows why it's important to use many different ways to check who someone is, to make sure the system really understands who's who.

Building a Comprehensive Verification Process

Incorporating selfie verification into a holistic verification strategy involves several components:

• Database Verification: Forming the foundation of identity verification, this method validates user-provided information against governmental sources.
• Document Checks: A foundational aspect of verification, this method involves users either snapping photos of or uploading essential documents, including government IDs establishing the primary basis for many verification efforts.
• Facial Recognition: When using selfie verification for identity checks, it’s beneficial to incorporate additional facial recognition methods to ensure a higher level of authentication accuracy.

Implementing Selfie Verification

Adopting selfie verification requires careful consideration of its capabilities and limitations. Businesses must tailor their verification processes to their unique needs, leveraging technologies like ZignSec's Verification solution to dynamically adjust verification steps based on risk and ensure compliance with KYC and AML regulations.

Accelerating Identity Verification

Fraudsters use smart tricks to fool systems that scan faces or other body parts. The idea of checking if a face is real and alive is very important to make sure these scans are safe. By looking at facial features in 3D, it makes sure the system is dealing with a real person, keeping online places safe and trusted.

Liveness checks also make proving who you are faster because you don't always have to show ID cards or do extra steps. This is great for buying things online because people can just use their face to say it's really them, making shopping online smooth and easy. This also helps if you forget your password. A quick check to make sure you're a real person can show you're the real owner of the account, which makes using online services more enjoyable.

Since these checks happen right away, there's no waiting around, which people really like. This is super useful for online activities that need quick decisions, making everything faster and easier for using the internet.

Conclusion

Strong protection against identity theft is essential. Using selfies for identity checks, along with technology that can tell if the selfie is real and taken live, is an important step in fighting this problem. Businesses need to know how well this works and what its limits are so they can make a checking process that follows the rules and keeps their customers safe. As online threats change, we also need to update how we protect digital identities to make sure the internet stays a safe place for everyone.

To learn more about how to implement Selfie Liveness Verification into your customer onboarding, or Identity Verification process you can contact us or request a demo.