Gartner Research

When Knowledge-Based Authentication Fails, and What You Can Do About It

Published: 25 September 2012

Summary

Verifying identities using knowledge-based authentication based on public data often results in high failure rates and customer inconvenience, and sometimes does not stop the fraud. Put complementary layered solutions in place.

Included in Full Research

  • Impacts
  • U.S. Gartner clients report an average of 10% to 15% failure rate on knowledge-based authentication (KBA) that relies on users answering personal questions based on public data, such as credit bureau or driver's license records — driving up customer service costs and customer dissatisfaction.
  • Most KBA failures are experienced by legitimate users who cannot answer the questions because they cannot remember the answers, or because the public records are lacking or incorrect
  • Criminals have circumvented KBA used on high-risk transactions by stealing or culling information from public aggregators or social networks

Analysts:

Avivah Litan

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