Identity Proofing

Identity Verification: A Coronavirus Challenge to the Financial World

Updated April 1st, 2020

This blog post has been coauthored with Karen Lewison

The coronavirus pandemic is causing unprecedented disruption throughout the business world. Businesses that are not able to cope with public health orders and new customer behaviors are going out of business, while businesses that are able to adapt are thriving and expanding their market share. Disruption will be temporary in sectors of the economy where face-to-face interaction adds value to the business-to-customer relationship and a physical presence on the street is an essential requirement of the business model; gyms, bars and conference centers will no doubt reopen once the pandemic has been controlled. But changes brought by the pandemic will be permanent in sectors of the economy where face-to-face interaction adds no value and a physical presence is a legacy of a traditional business model. One of those sectors is the financial world.

A challenge to financial institutions

Financial institutions have been less impacted than other businesses by the pandemic. In the US, the entire financial sector has been declared critical infrastructure by DHS and is thus protected against closure orders by states or counties. And most financial transactions are now conducted online using web browsers or mobile apps, without face-to-face interactions that would put employees and customers at risk of contagion. Nevertheless, coronavirus poses a challenge to financial institutions: how to verify the identity of new customers.

Pomcor Granted Patent on Rich Credentials

Pomcor has been granted US Patent 10,567,377, Multifactor Privacy-Enhanced Remote Identification Using a Rich Credential. Karen Lewison is the lead inventor and I am a coinventor. Pomcor has so far been granted a total of eight patents, two of which we have sold. The remaining six patents that we own are listed in the Patents page of this web site.

This latest patent is special because it provides a solution to a major societal problem: how to identify people over the Internet with strong security. Techniques are available for authenticating repeat visitors to a web site or current users of a web application. But authentication techniques are only applicable once a relationship has been established. They are not applicable when somebody wants to establish a new relationship, e.g. by becoming a new customer of a bank, or signing up with a robo advisor, or applying for a mortgage, or renting an apartment, or switching to a different car insurance.

A New Tool Against the Surge of Application Fraud

This blog post has been coauthored with Karen Lewison

In recent posts we have been concerned with online credit card fraud and how to fight it using cardholder authentication. In this post we are concerned with another kind of financial fraud, known as application fraud or new account fraud. Both kinds of fraud have been rising after the introduction of chip cards, for reasons mentioned by Elizabeth Lasher in her article The Surge of Application Fraud:

“Due to the high volume of data breaches, Social Security numbers, mailing addresses, passwords, health history, even the name of our first pet is all for sale on the Dark Web. When you combine this phenomenon with the economic pressure applied on fraudsters to find a new cash cow after chip and signature plugged a gap in card-present fraud in the US, there is a perfect storm.”

The term “application fraud” refers to the creation of a financial account, such as a bank account or a mortgage account, with the intention to commit fraud. Application fraud can be first-party fraud, where the account is opened under the fraudster’s own identity, or third-party fraud, where the fraudster uses a stolen identity. Here we are primarily concerned with the latter.

Second Release of PJCL Expands Functionality Following NIST Cryptographic Specifications

Today we have released version 0.9.1 of the Pomcor JavaScript Crytpographic Library (PJCL). The initial public release provided digital signature functionality, which we had been using internally for our own research on authentication and identity proofing. This release adds key agreement and key derivation functionality. The next release will provide symmetric and asymmetric encryption primitives, including AES and RSA. To be notified of future releases you may ~~sign up for the user forum~~, subscribe to the feed of this blog, or follow me on Twitter (@fcorella). (Update: The PJCL user forum has been discontinued as of May 27, 2018.)

PJCL can be used in any JavaScript environment, both client-side (e.g. in a browser) and server-side (e.g. under Node.js). It comes with extensive documentation on the functionality that it provides, which includes:

Pomcor Releases JavaScript Cryptographic and Big Integer Library

We have just released a beta version of a JavaScript cryptographic library usable in any JavaScript environment and based on very fast big integer arithmetic functionality that may be of interest in its own right.

The Pomcor JavaScript Cryptographic Library (PJCL) is available free of charge for any kind of use, but not under a traditional open source license. The traditional open source paradigm encourages contributions by the developer community at large, but we believe that this paradigm is not well suited to cryptography. To protect the integrity of the cryptographic code, the license prohibits modification of the cryptographic functions.

We have been using the library internally for our own research on authentication and identity proofing, and this first release includes symmetric and asymmetric digital signature functionality, including HMAC, DSA, and ECDSA with NIST curves. Future releases will provide broader cryptographic functionality, including encryption and key exchange. We believe that the library provides the only available JavaScript implementation of DSA, which is important to those wary of the opportunities for hiding backdoors that might be provided by elliptic curve technology.

The underlying big integer functionality includes Karatsuba multiplication. Continue reading “Pomcor Releases JavaScript Cryptographic and Big Integer Library”

Storing Cryptographic Keys in Persistent Browser Storage

This blog post is a companion to a presentation made at the 2017 International Cryptographic Module Conference and refers to the presentation slides, revised after the conference. Karen Lewison is a co-author of the presentation and of this blog post.

Slide 2: Key storage in web clients

Most Web applications today use TLS, thus relying on cryptography to provide a secure channel between client and server, and to authenticate the server to the client by means of a cryptographic credential, consisting of a TLS server certificate and its associated private key. But other uses of cryptography by Web applications are still rare. Client authentication still relies primarily on traditional username-and-password, one-time passwords, proof of possession of a mobile phone, biometrics, or combinations of two or more of such authentication factors. Web payments still rely on a credit card number being considered a secret. Encrypted messaging is on the rise, but is not Web-based.

A major obstacle to broader use of cryptography by Web applications is the problem of where to store cryptographic keys on the client side. Continue reading “Storing Cryptographic Keys in Persistent Browser Storage”

Using Near-Field Communication for Remote Identity Proofing

This is the last of a four-part series of posts presenting results of a project sponsored by an SBIR Phase I grant from the US Department of Homeland Security. These posts do not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the US Government.

We have just published a paper presenting the last three of the five solutions that we have identified in the research project on remote identity proofing that we are now finalizing. Solutions 3–5 use Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology for remote identity proofing. Each of the solutions uses a preexisting NFC-enabled hardware token designed for some other purpose as a credential in remote identity proofing. A native app running on an NFC-enabled mobile device serves as a relay between the NFC token and the remote verifier.

In Solution 3 the token is a contactless EMV payment card. In Solution 4, the token is a medical identification smart card containing a private key and a certificate that binds the associated public key to attributes and a facial image. In Solution 5, the token is an e-Passport with an embedded RFID chip that contains signed data comprising biographic data and a facial image.

In solutions 4 and 5 a native app submits to the verifier an audio-visual stream of the subject reading prompted text. The verifier matches the face in the video to the facial image in the NFC token, uses speech recognition technology to verify that the subject is reading the text that was prompted, and verifies that the audio and video channels of the stream are in synchrony by matching distinguishable visemes in the video channel to phonemes in the audio channel.

See also:

The Remote Identity Proofing page, with links to other materials related to the project.

Remote Identity Proofing Discussed at the Internet Identity Workshop

This is Part 3 of a series of posts presenting results of a project sponsored by an SBIR Phase I grant from the US Department of Homeland Security. These posts do not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the US Government.

To get community feedback on our remote identity proofing project we made a presentation two days ago at the 23rd Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View. The slides can be found here. We were gratified that the feedback was positive and there were in-depth discussions with identity experts both during and after the presentation.

We started by explaining the goal of the project. Remote identity proofing has often relied on asking the subject multiple-choice “knowledge questions” (e.g. which of the following zip codes did you live in five years ago?). This method is terrible for privacy, since it relies on the identity proofing service gathering and using troves of personal information about people. Furthermore, due to the proliferation of personal data available online, it has now become ineffective. Continue reading “Remote Identity Proofing Discussed at the Internet Identity Workshop”

Implementing a PKI on a Blockchain

This is Part 2 of a series of posts presenting results of a project sponsored by an SBIR Phase I grant from the US Department of Homeland Security. These posts do not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the US Government.

In the previous post I described the concept of a rich credential, and how a rich credential issued by an identity source can allow a subject to identify him/herself remotely to a verifier with a key pair, a password, and one or more biometric samples such as facial image, even if there is no prior relationship between the subject and the verifier. That was Solution 1, the first of five solutions that we have identified as possible alternatives to knowledge-based verification in the course of our research project on remote identity proofing.

We have now published a paper on Solution 2. In Solution 1 the identity source was a DMV. In Solution 2 the identity source is a bank.

Rich Credentials for Three-Factor Identity Verification without Prior Relationship

This is Part 1 of a series of posts presenting results of a project sponsored by an SBIR Phase I grant from the US Department of Homeland Security. These posts do not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the US Government.

We have just published a paper on the first of five remote identity proofing solutions, which we have identified as possible alternatives to knowledge-based verification in the course of the research project mentioned in the previous post. The paper describes in detail a new type of credential, which we call a rich credential, that could be issued by an identity source such as a DMV and would enable multifactor identity verification by a remote verifier. In this post I will try to explain the motivations that led us to come up with the concept of a rich credential as the basis of Solution 1.

In-person identity proofing typically relies on the presentation of a picture ID, such as a driver’s license or a passport, as the primary evidence of identity, supplemented by secondary evidence from different identity sources, such as proof of ownership of utility, financial or mobile accounts and address verification. Remote presentation of the secondary evidence is not much of a problem, so in the project we have focused on replacing the picture ID with other kinds of primary evidence that can be presented remotely.