Seeking to enhance the biometrics of its digital identity platform, Yoti has teamed up with 3D facial recognition specialist FaceTec. The companies have announced that the latter’s FaceTec ZoOm 3D Authentication solution is now part of the Yoti portfolio.
A New Kind of ID
At just about a year and a half after its launch, Yoti has established itself as a true innovator in the identity space with its mobile-focused approach to digital ID. Essentially, the company’s eponymous solution is designed to use biometric facial recognition and document reading in order to match end users’ selfies to their official IDs. Once that link is established, a digital ID is created that can function just the same as a physical ID for identification purposes, while opening up new possibilities thanks to its digital nature.
For example, Yoti has demonstrated how the solution can be used to facilitate the purchase of restricted goods such as alcoholic beverages at self-serve checkouts, with users able to scan their items and use Yoti for their proof of age. More broadly, though, it can be used as a full-on replacement for official identification at airports, and can even be used as its own kind of official government ID, as Yoti’s collaboration with Scotland’s Improvement Service is now demonstrating.
The Need for Liveness Detection
The catch with these kinds of sensitive applications of Yoti’s digital ID solution is that they present a higher security requirement. And that’s where FaceTec’s 3D facial recognition technology comes in.
The primary threat to counteract is spoofing – the possibility that a malicious actor will impersonate a legitimate user, for example: by presenting a video of the latter’s face to an authenticating device in order to fool it into reading that video as an actual selfie. FaceTec’s ZoOm solution eliminates this threat through its powerful biometric solution, which is designed to establish a 3D map of an end user’s face, even with a traditional mobile camera. And its sophistication has been proven through FaceTec’s success in becoming the first and only company to attain Level-1 and Level-2 certification in the industry-leading iBeta Presentation Attack Detection test, with FaceTec further showing off its expertise through comprehensive white papers.
Attesting to this kind of sophistication, Yoti Chief Product Officer Madhu Nori said in a statement, “We reviewed a number of providers and found ZoOm to be superior to the other solutions we tested.”
“We found the anti-spoofing and liveness detection approach very strong and innovative, with a simple and intuitive UX for individuals,” he added. “It’s also a scalable solution; an important consideration for us as we expand globally.”
That’s all good news for the many end users who will take advantage of Yoti’s virtual ID solution as the platform’s reach expands, and for the organizations relying on it for authentication, with the threat of spoofing virtually eliminated while the convenience of the solution is sustained.
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March 25, 2019 – by Alex Perala
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