UnifyID’s ingenious user authentication platform wins Innovation Sandbox Contest
A panel of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and large security companies selected UnifyID from a group of 10 finalists as the winner of the Innovation Sandbox Contest at RSA Conference 2017.
The annual conference competition is a half-day program during which up-and-coming startups grab the spotlight and demonstrate groundbreaking security technologies to the broader RSA Conference community. Past winners include Sourcefire, Imperva and most recently Phantom.
How does the UnifyID user authentication platform work?
UnifyID is a holistic implicit authentication platform designed for online and offline use. It utilizes sensor data from everyday devices and machine learning to seamlessly authenticate users. By combining 100+ attributes, UnifyID achieves more than 99.999 percent true positive rate.
The UnifyID product consists of an app that runs on users’ devices as well as a cloud service. The local apps periodically collect sensor data from the local device, process it, and communicate with the cloud service.
The company use a variety of data sources all of which are implicit in nature, requiring no conscious action by the user. On mobile devices, they make use of a variety of sensors including GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer, ambient light, and wifi and Bluetooth signal telemetries. On the PC and laptop side, they look at factors such as keystroke timing, mouse/touchpad movements, as well as wifi and Bluetooth telemetry data from not the users’ devices, but also from other signals that are found around them.
All sensor data is processed locally and a small stream of extracted features is sent to the company’s cloud-based machine learning system, which automatically finds correlations between factors and discovers what makes users unique. The data is kept on the local device, is encrypted and anonymized.
On the PC and laptop side, the solution looks at factors such as keystroke timing (not what you type, but how you type), mouse/touchpad movements (finger length affects swipe/scroll arc), as well as looking at wifi and Bluetooth telemetry data from not only users’ devices, but also from other signals that are found around them.
“Innovation Sandbox’s ten finalists once again exceeded expectations by providing innovative ideas and solutions,” said Linda Gray Martin, Director & General Manager of RSA Conference. “UnifyID demonstrated they were the most innovative by proving there is a way to actually leverage the individuality of humans to improve security.”
