When it comes to user experience, businesses must strive to provide a seamless authentication experience to their users. This can be achieved by following some of the best practices while designing digital systems.
No matter what kind of identity management system you’re building — desktop or mobile — you want users to interact with your system naturally and simply. The process should be fast, which is where passive authentication can help.
Passive authentication is a concept that has gained considerable traction in the last few years, especially with the advent of modern authentication techniques.
It is crucial to understand how passive authentication works so that you can verify users’ digital signatures without requiring additional actions from them. This reduces friction in your customer experience and lays a foundation for building rich multi-channel customer experiences.
Let’s understand the aspects associated with passive authentication and how businesses can leverage its true potential for designing a great customer experience without compromising authentication security.
What is Passive Authentication? How Does it Work?
Passive authentication is the advanced and most convenient form of authentication that verifies a user’s digital signature rather than demanding a user to prove their identity. Passive authentication helps build great user experiences since users have just to present their digital signatures of previously made digital identities. And hence, saving a lot of time and effort.
Passive authentication uses public-key cryptography to verify the digital signature presented by a user. The process works in the following way:
The first step is for the user to generate a private/public key pair. The public key is made available to anyone who wants it—this is called publishing your public key.
In the second step, when you want to authenticate yourself with someone else’s website or application, your computer creates a message digest based on information about yourself (such as your name). That digest is encrypted using your private key and then sent over the internet with your public key.
Finally, when someone else receives that message digest, they use your public key to decrypt it and verify that it matches what they were expecting based on what they know about you already (e.g., your name).
Passive authentication helps build great user experiences since users have just to present their digital signatures of previously made digital identities.
The process of passive authentication involves “channeling” the user’s “digital identity” by identifying the person and verifying that they are who they say they are. Passive authentication is performed using a device such as an address book or even a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter.
Passive Authentication vs. Active Authentication
Passive authentication and active authentication are two different ways of authenticating a user.
Passive authentication requires the user to present a token that refers to their digital identity. They could do this by using biometrics, credentials, or any other mechanism that is easily accessible and not time-consuming for them.
Active authentication demands that users prove their identity through biometrics, credentials, or similar authentication mechanisms. It requires users to take more time than passive authentication does because they have to prove who they are by providing information about themselves.
Why Must Businesses Put Their Best Foot Forward in Adopting Passive Authentication?
Passive authentication is becoming more and more popular, and for a good reason. It helps streamline the user experience by providing a fast and easy way to access your accounts, and it allows your users to get the information they need quickly and painlessly.
Passive authentication also offers robust identity security since account takeover chances are negligible in the case of passive authentication. This helps build brand trust among your customers—they know their information is safe with you, no matter their device.
And finally, passive authentication is an excellent way for businesses to reach out to new customers who might not have heard about them before—it enables them to ensure that their brand reaches as many people as possible through multiple channels.
Passive authentication offers several benefits over traditional login methods:
– It’s easier for users to log in because they only need to enter a single-use code or token, which an app or device can generate.
– Since this method doesn’t require entering a username or password, it decreases the chances of account takeover by hackers who may try logging into someone else’s account using those credentials.
– It helps businesses build brand trust since they’re showing users that they care about their security and value their time and effort.
In Conclusion
The world is changing, and so are the expectations of customers. The need for a seamless and secure customer journey is key to delivering on their needs. To do this, brands must ensure that they have robust security.
And passive authentication helps enable both of these goals by making the user experience easier and more secure at the same time.
Businesses can leverage passive authentication to navigate digital success by creating rich, frictionless authentication experiences on their mobile apps and websites.
