Abstract: The goal of MFA and other authentication solutions is to determine who the person at the keyboard is or on the mobile device. The traditional approach of having a username and a password as identification factors has been shown to be flawed and exploitable – what they say is not a good indication of who they are. This discussion examines the effectiveness of using a modern machine learning ML-based approach that examines key user behaviors and biometrics together to get a high level of assurance that we know the identity of the person behind the keyboard. After all, it’s what you do that counts.
How does that recipe go again? If you take a pinch of human behavior, throw in some biological data, mix in some serious math, and what do you get?
It turns out, that if done right, you get a powerful new tool for helping you ensure your customers, your partners, and your employees’ digital identity accurately. It’s even got a cool name – Bio-Behavioral Analytics – and it’s being used right now to create better outcomes for security teams and to lower friction for folks to access the tools they need.
What is Bio-Behavioral Analytics?
Bio-behavioral analytics is an interdisciplinary field that combines biological data (such as fingerprints and facial recognition) with behavioral data (including what applications users access, when they access them most frequently, and what devices they use to access them). By integrating these two domains, bio-behavioral analytics provides a modern solution to the increasingly difficult problem of ensuring that the person on the keyboard is the person they say they are.
The Three Pillars of Bio-Behavioral Analytics
- Data Collection: Bio-behavioral analytics relies on the collection of diverse data types. Traditional methods, such as surveys and questionnaires, are often combined with cutting-edge technologies, including wearable devices, biosensors, and social media mining. This multifaceted data collection approach enables the capture of both subjective and objective information about individuals in real-time.
- Data Integration: The integration of different data sources is a critical aspect of bio-behavioral analytics. This integration allows for a holistic view of an individual’s biological and behavioral patterns, revealing intricate connections and associations that would be challenging to identify using single-source data analysis.
- Insights: Once the data is collected and integrated, bio-behavioral analytics employs sophisticated analytical techniques to extract meaningful insights. By analyzing patterns, correlations, and anomalies, these new sophisticated tools are able to generate new models that predict who is accessing the critical applications and data in your business.
Applications of Bio-Behavioral Analytics to Security
There are a number of ways that these new models can be effectively leveraged by your organization.
- Bio-behavioral Analysis
Bio-behavioral analysis will tell you better than a username and password who the person accessing your portal or application is. You can eliminate cumbersome logon procedures and make it simpler for your users to gain access, dramatically reducing both the time it takes for a user to gain access and the number of Help Desk calls your technical team has to field for password resets and other time-consuming login challenges.
- Increased Security for your important data and applications
While reducing friction, you are also more confident about who the person is that is trying to gain access. The combination of biology and behavior results in models that are far more difficult to fool than more traditional approaches. Many of the factors are completely unique and difficult if not impossible to be faked, and using a combination in a Bio-behavior approach is far more secure than that.
- Continuous Analysis
Applying these models at logon gives you a good sense of who the person on the keyboard is. The models are always there to be used and evaluations are quick, and as a result, these new techniques can be applied on a continuous basis to ensure that the person at the keyboard is the same one that logged on. Whether it’s the patterns of application access, proximity between devices used in the access experience, time and location-based analysis that indicates impossible travel, or other evidence that the keyboard user has changed, continuously applied bio-behavioral analysis opens up new possibilities for an organization to be continuously protected and more assured than ever that they know who it is.
Bio-behavioral analytics represents an exciting frontier in data-driven insights, where biology and behavior converge. By integrating biological and behavioral data, organizations can gain a better way to control access. And as technology advances and our understanding of human behavior deepens, bio-behavioral analytics will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping our data-driven world. Want to see how bio-behavioral analytics looks live, request a demo of Arculix by SecureAuth’s next-gen authentication solution.
