Kenshiki Labs Offers Bounty to Break Its Proof-of-Identity System

Kenshiki Labs, a Tacoma, Washington-based identity verification vendor, is offering a $12,500 bounty to any cybersecurity red team that can bypass its proof-of-identity system without a live human present.

The company says lenders lose billions of dollars a year to synthetic identity fraud because underwriting systems check whether an application looks legitimate on paper rather than whether the applicant actually exists, a weakness it says AI-generated fraud has made worse. Its Pulse platform is built to require what it calls hardware-rooted proof before an application can proceed, linking a phone’s hardware, a live biometric check, and an NFC read from a chip-enabled government ID on the backend before treating a session as complete.

The Pulse Bond Challenge opens July 4 and runs for 28 days, inviting red teams to try to defeat that combined hardware, biometric, and document-chip verification stack. Kenshiki says participants must clear the full stack to win, rather than exploiting a single weak point.

“AI didn’t just make fraud faster and cheaper. It made it scale by driving the cost of manufacturing a human identity to near zero,” said Stephen Fishburn, chief executive of Kenshiki Labs. “Fraud rings exploit vulnerable identity signals at industrial scale, and the legacy systems still haven’t caught up in this AI arms race.”

Kenshiki Labs describes itself as a provider of high-assurance identity verification infrastructure for lenders, credit bureaus, and financial institutions. The challenge lands as synthetic identity fraud has become a growing share of overall fraud losses, after one recent industry report put synthetic identity fraud at 11 percent of all global fraud.

Sources: BusinessWire

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By the ID Tech Editorial Team