Decentralized identity and Verifiable Credentials remove the vulnerabilities driving generative-AI, social engineering, and synthetic identity fraud at a significantly lower cost than legacy or alternative solutions. How? The technology allows you to just bypass these problems. With Indicio Proven, you get authentication and fraud prevention in a single, affordable, globally interoperable platform.
By Trevor Butterworth
The new report by Liminal — The Convergence of Authentication and Fraud Prevention — makes for stark reading.
Fraud losses in the U.S. alone are projected to double in just three years to $63.9 billion, with account takeover fraud accounting for half. Seventy-one percent of respondents to their survey of 200 buyers in retail, ecommerce, financial services and tech believe current methods of authentication may be insufficient to thwart generative-AI social engineering attacks. And almost two-thirds worry that additional security layers will add unacceptable friction to customer and user experience.
One could say the problem is that the technology powering fraud is more powerful than the technology powering authentication and fraud prevention. And the latter’s weakness is compounded by authentication and fraud prevention being two separate processes, often managed by multiple different vendors.
The solution is more of everything — more layers of defense, multi-level signals analysis, more authentication factors, and good AI to battle the bad AI. All of which translates into more complexity, friction, and cost. No surprise, Liminal also reports increasing budgets for authentication, account takeover protection, and social engineering scam prevention, and it projects these budgets will continue increasing year-on-year.
Meanwhile, customers and consumers — many of whom are digital natives — expect seamless, frictionless interaction and not painful multifactor authentication. As a result, organizations face brutal tradeoffs: cater to digital behavior and increase risk, or decrease risk but make customers pay in friction and risk losing them.
Fix the fundamental problem
There’s a reason the technology powering fraud has the upper hand: The legacy systems organizations rely on — username/password, stored biometrics, centralized databases filled with personal data — are all vulnerabilities easily exploited by brute-force AI attacks, synthetic identity fraud, and deepfakes.
Remove these vulnerabilities and you remove these problems. That’s what decentralized identity does. It removes the need for usernames, passwords, and the centralized storage of personal data needed to manage identity and access.
That’s what Indicio’s customers are doing — sweeping away the digital structures and processes that are the cause of all these problems.
We replace this with Verifiable Credentials. They’re a simple way for each party in a digital interaction — customers, organizations, employees, devices, virtual assistants — to authenticate the other in a way that can’t be phished, hacked, or faked; and we do this authentication before any data is shared.
Verifiable Credentials reduce fraud by enabling digital credentials to be bound to individuals in a way that is cryptographically tamper-proof, and which can incorporate biometrics that have been authenticated. This closes off attack vectors like phishing, synthetic identities, and — with an authenticated biometric in a Verifiable Credential — deepfakes.
A person with an authenticated biometric in a Verifiable Credential has a portable digital proof of themselves that can be instantly corroborated against a liveness check.
A decentralized identity architecture changes everything. It integrates authentication and fraud prevention, creates unified digital identities, and enables data to be fully portable, trusted and acted on immediately — without friction to businesses or customers.
Just as important, it’s significantly less expensive than legacy or alternative solutions; it can be layered into existing systems, meaning that it’s a solution that, depending on the scope, can be implemented in days or weeks.
Don’t take our word, see what our customers are doing
Indicio and its customers — enterprises, financial services, governments — have had enough of the same old same old. We and they are using Verifiable Credentials to cross borders, onboard customers, and authenticate account access — all seamlessly with the highest level of digital identity assurance.
It might be hard to believe that a solution could be that simple — that you can just remove the core vulnerabilities fueling the surge in identity-related fraud and not have to rip and replace your entire authentication infrastructure.
Contact us to see a demo — and discover how Indicio Proven is being used as a single authentication and fraud prevention system to create seamless and trusted digital interaction.
