iProov Liveness Assurance

How iProov developed Liveness Assurance

September 30 2021

Since 2011, iProov has focused on controlled illumination as a means of assuring genuine presence of a remote user. This technology has proven to be unrivalled in its usability and the robustness of its security.

iProov has also been interested in motion as a biometric and signal of genuineness since 2014. In that year, iProov won a grant from Innovate UK (the UK government’s innovation agency, known at the time as the Technology Strategy Board) for a project looking at the feasibility of using hand movements as a biometric.

In 2014, iProov also won Innovate UK funding to study the way changes in images resulting from device movement, in itself a weak indicator of liveness, could be combined with motion sensor data to provide an adequately strong signal of liveness.

This project was very successful and in 2015 iProov filed patents, subsequently granted in US and overseas, covering this innovation.

The Innovate UK project also addressed the case where motion sensors were not available. This gave rise to some innovations on which patents were filed in 2014 and subsequently granted in many countries worldwide.

iProov was aware of the potential security vulnerabilities that affect liveness technologies based on device motion. This led iProov to focus instead on developing the much higher integrity solution made possible by iProov’s patented Flashmark technology. This was subsequently launched as Genuine Presence Assurance and has won many international awards for its exceptional security and usability.

In the first half of 2020, iProov was able to use the wealth of liveness technology that it had already developed to bring a product to market to meet low risk applications where traditional levels of liveness would be sufficient. This product could continue to provide extremely good usability and high conversion rates (in contrast with competitive offerings). This has earned it significant success in the commodity liveness assurance market.

iProov was also able to combine its Liveness Assurance product with its unique, market-leading Genuine Presence Assurance technology to create another unique offering in 2020: Flexible Authentication. This enables organizations to select the level of ceremony/security trade-off appropriate to each transaction, on a transaction-by-transaction basis, using a single SDK, a single integration and single commercial contract.

Now processing large volumes of liveness assurance, iProov continues to develop its technology and to educate the market on when its use is appropriate. There are many use cases, particularly in government and financial services, when liveness simply does not offer adequate security and Genuine Presence Assurance is the only robust way to safeguard the citizen, the organization and society. Today, Genuine Presence Assurance is the only solution available on the market that adequately defends high value or high profile targets against the full range of attacks launched by determined adversaries. It is also the only solution that has been approved by several national government testing programs.

iProov continues to devote the energies of dozens of research scientists in its rapidly growing Science team to focus on this area. By developing new techniques to defend against tens of thousands of real world attacks against high value targets, iProov can keep its customers and their customers safe through assuring the genuine presence of online users.

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