Audio Blog: Workforce ID Proofing
For 1Kosmos, what does Identity proofing, or ID proofing in the workforce mean?
Well, for us, ID proofing is an irrefutable approach that is used to verify and authenticate the identity of an employee who accesses one of his or her employer’s system or application.
How does 1Kosmos irrefutably authenticate a user’s identity?
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, has come up with a comprehensive guideline document for validating a person’s identity. Per the NIST 800-63 guidelines, there are 3 levels of identity assurance, or IAL 1, IAL2 and, yes… IAL3.
1Kosmos is the only contact-free authentication solution on the market to reach a level of identity assurance 3.
What does that entail?
We invite employees to enroll 3 attributes on our mobile application by scanning a driver’s license and a passport, and by performing a liveness test.
By enrolling a driver’s license and a passport, we are able to validate the employee’s first and last name, date of birth and ensure, to the extent possible, that the photos on both documents actually match. And I’m sure you understand why a perfect match is impossible. The photo on your driver’s license is taken at the DMV whereas the photo on your passport requires a trip to your local Walgreens.
But how do we know that these documents are valid. How do we ensure that one of the documents hasn’t been stolen, for example?
We leverage sources of truth to make the verification.
For driver’s licenses, we query the database of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. For passports, we connect to the State Department’s database. Therefore, we’re able to verify that those government-issued documents are valid, and not stolen or lost.
But is that sufficient? Our competition believes it is. We do not.
This is why we add an extra source of truth to our ID proofing process: a liveness test.
A liveness test is a test performed to verify if the biometric traits of an individual are from a living person rather than an artificial or lifeless person. This biometric feature is essential because, ultimately, facial spoofing which is the task of creating false facial verification by using a photo, video, mask or a different substitute for an authorized person’s face is not too difficult if someone really wants to impersonate you. Each time a user needs to authenticate, a liveness test is required. If it doesn’t match the liveness test performed during the enrollment process, the authentication fails.
And, in addition to enrolling those 3 attributes, 1Kosmos accesses even more sources of validation. For example, we use a passport’s chip to validate the fact that the passport scanned during the enrollment process matches digitally signed data. We can also use external sources of truth like a credit card, a bank account or a loyalty program to strengthen the ID assurance level.
The process of identity proofing is critical to help organizations protect themselves and their employees from security threats. Thanks to 1Kosmos, businesses can feel confident that those accessing their systems are indeed valid users.
Learn more by listening to the audio blog below:
