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LiveEnsure announced a solution designed to address current shortcomings in global user authentication techniques, adding contextual analysis to ensure certainty of identification with minimal personal imposition and a focus on privacy.
The company pairs a light mobile client with a few lines of system code to help ensure ease of deployment and use on both sides of any authentication experience.
“User authentication is critical to every level of digital activity. Without it, no payment, social connection, login, download, access or interaction can be considered authentic. All meaning, value and validity surrounding them are suspect,” Christian Hessler, CEO of LiveEnsure, told eWEEK. “User authenticity is like a personal brand. It is the very essence of our digital selves, since we lack any actual physical manifestation in the bit realm. Personal information, reputation, integrity and revocability are critical to surviving and thriving in cyberspace, whether via mobile, desktop, wearable or the Internet of things.”
The platform correlates data on a variety of dynamics involving device type, location and even user behavior for irrefutable authentication without certificates, tokens, SMS, biometrics, NFC, OOB, OTP or other techniques.
“It’s about the crowd, not the cloud. The cloud is big, the hackers are bigger, but the crowd is the biggest of all. It is the base of the identity and authenticity triangle and it is where the solution lies,” Hessler said. “In addition, if you want to beat a scalable hack or threat, you simply have to out-scale it–and we have that opportunity with LiveEnsure.”
He said users have a personal vested interested in maintaining the sanctity, anonymity and control of their authentication, and without it, they are powerless to explore, inhabit and benefit from the digital world.
Along with integration partners Pebble, Drop Payments and Intrinsic ID, LiveEnsure also launched an initiative that aims to free mobile users from the need to handle devices, cards and other forms of payment and identification when making in-store purchases.
When fully realized, project Freehand will enable users to communicate securely with staff, products and points-of-sale through whatever device they choose.
LiveEnsure and Intrinsic-ID have partnered to offer physically inclinable factors (PUF) for mobile devices across iOS, Android and Windows Phone, while LiveEnsure Pebble factors will launch on both the iOS and Android apps this year.
“LiveEnsure and Drop have teamed to improve the privacy, security and scalability of mobile transactions on smart devices and wearables, Hessler said. “The three goals of project Freehand are to design elegant and secure mobile, wearable and commerce technology that simplifies and streamlines the experience, to design user experiences in gaming, driving, shopping and other navigable environments where users need tech to free up their focus, not monopolize it, and to bring security, authenticity and trust to the fabric, under full, private user control that thwarts the hacks, outscales the threats and turns security from something people hate into something they embrace,” he explained.