The Evolution of Authentication — Why I Jumped Ship
As a former FinTech executive, I have had the challenge and pleasure of defining IT strategy with first-hand exposure to global operations at some of the largest known firms. The market has always been susceptible to loopholes — take authentication for example. We have seen traders refuting their accountability for instant messaging exchanges all the way up to the highest levels of the law. With that, individual claims need to be investigated, usurping time, money, and energy. What chief security officers need now is a platform that will mitigate the risk of access and control, ensuring that relevant and approved users are accessing content and resources appropriately and that sensitive data is truly protected. A back-end server platform, combined with a front-end authentication solution tethering the individual to the transaction, is critical.
The evolution of authenticating users in the enterprise has followed a long and winding path. The traditional password is antiquated, inefficient, and highly ineffective and is, in fact, driving people to the point of distraction. Passwords are something you know, versus something you are (biometrics), making them easy to lose and crack. In addition to being weak methods of verifying identity, passwords have become increasingly complicated and are harder than ever to remember. Further, the costs associated with resetting passwords, combined with the astronomical damage of data breaches, will soon make passwords obsolete. In the FinTech world, it is common practice to spend every Monday morning resetting forgotten employee passwords, to the tune of $5–6 million annually.
This is why biometrics is taking hold as a more reliable alternative. Also, with the proliferation of mobile, biometrics is now accessible to the mass market, putting it (literally and figuratively) into the hands of users across the globe. Multifactor authentication — combining either a password and one or two biometric factors — is rapidly gaining momentum. There are many emerging biometric applications, including 4 Fingers TouchlessID, face and voice recognition, liveness detection, and iris scanning, that rely on unique traits or behavioral characteristics to protect users. Although many offer strong value propositions, some are more flawed and ‘spoofable’ than others.
Where the rubber meets the road in this process of protecting users, however, is not in choosing how to authenticate users. What is critical in the evolution of authentication is securing the wide swath of personal data companies are now privy to — an area that few in this space are addressing.
In the financial industry, it’s hard enough for banks to be the custodian of your money and your personal data, let alone adding the risk of guarding your biometrics to that list. Moreover, end users are equally as concerned about giving up control of so much of themselves to an institution. Imagine a bank is breached and now they hold your money, your detailed activity, and your biometrics. Sure, you can change your password and insurance will cover returned funds (to a specific value), but you can’t reset your fingerprints — once that data is stolen, they’re gone.
When I heard about the one company solving this issue, I took a bold leap of faith, jumped ship, and joined the start-up. Veridium is a biometric authentication company who has created an extensible platform that enables biometric authentication into any application a company wants to secure, protecting its most sensitive data at its core. VeridiumID’s storage architecture uses visual cryptography to encrypt highly secure biometric data into two separate vectors. One is stored on the mobile device and the other on the server for maximum security — alleviating the burden on the enterprise.
While biometrics solutions will continue to evolve, there is finally a platform that exists to safeguard both companies and consumers from the threat of fraud and data breaches. At Veridium, we will continue to develop biometric encryption solutions that best serve the enterprise, but what sets us apart is our distributed data model designed to protect data at its core and allow companies to be in complete control. The work going on here at Veridium is infectious and I am grateful to be a part of the company bringing forth a solution perfectly positioned to support and grow the market, in whichever form it takes.
