TECHNOLOGY WHITEPAPER Securing Citizen Self-Service for Government AURAYA SYSTEMS One Tara Boulevard Nashua, New Hampshire 03062 +1 603 123 7654 twitter.com/armorvox linkedin/in/armorvox
Securing Citizen Self-Service for Government How cash-strapped government agencies can deliver secure self-services even in economically challenging times. The Problem: Government Needs to Deliver More Services with Less Budget Government, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are bolstering their identity verification methods in response to epidemic levels of security breaches, identity theft, password hacks and fraud. Moreover, the problem is only going to get worse as economies struggle and citizens find themselves in financial difficulty. At the same time, Governments are under pressure to deliver more services, more effectively and more efficiently to their citizens, yet with reduced budgets and funding. Increased Use of Citizen Self-Service Fraught with Risk In this environment, Governments often look to increase use of citizen self-service, either delivered through the Internet or via the telephone. But the traditional secure solutions, such as PINs, passwords and the use of personal information questions to authenticate identity to enable secure selfservice is rapidly becoming completely inadequate. These measures are no longer sufficient to maintain strong identity authentication needed to deliver effective and secure government services. Apart from the inconvenience of remembering yet another set of PIN s and passwords for a government service, there is the high cost and inconvenience of resetting them when they are forgotten, stolen or compromised. Further, simply knowing a PIN or password does not mean to say it is you. PINs and passwords are regularly shared, stolen and misused. In addition, providing personal information to authenticate identity in call centers and helps desks (often to reset forgotten passwords) is equally fraught with danger. Firstly, knowing a name, address, telephone number and other information is no guarantee that you are who you say you are. Furthermore, in government call centers and help desks; there is the added security threat from agents being exposing citizens personal information to staff. In this situation, governments often need to vet and closely manage call center and help-desk staff, adding further cost to already stretched budgets. Amid these challenges, government agencies are increasingly turning to voice biometrics as a technology to provide strong but efficient citizen identity authentication. Voice biometrics, a technology 2
that authenticates a caller from their voice characteristics, is increasingly being used in citizen facing services to streamline call center services and as an enabler of secure self-service applications. Voice, like a fingerprint, is unique to each person. This fact can be used in telephone and Internet services to positively authenticate that a person is, literally, who they say they are. Typically, in a telephone service, for example, a person quotes an account number (or other information) to the system. The system uses speech recognition to recogniser the account number and voice biometrics to confirm it is the account holder saying their account number (and not an imposter trying to break into their account). The Solution: Voice Biometric Solution Ensures You Are Who You Say You Are This way the technology eliminates the need for citizens to have PINs or passwords to access secure services or indeed provide personal information to a call center or help desk staff to prove they are who they say they are! Centerlink, for example (the Australian social security department), has had a voice biometric system in operation since 2009. This system, which now has around 1 million registered users, enables regular callers to authenticate their identity by simply saying their Centerlink number, name and the answer to a secret question. The system analyses the voice of the caller to confirm they are the account holder and their request can then be immediately processed, either by a call center agent, or by the telephone self-service system. The system eliminates the need for callers to quote personal information to Centerlink staff or the need for citizens to remember PINs and passwords for access to self-service applications. IRD, the New Zealand tax office, is also rolling out a voice biometric system configured to authenticate upwards of 800,000 citizens to make accessing taxation services that much more convenient for tax payers, whilst driving cost saving for the government agency. Whilst designed primarily to streamline access to taxation services and eliminate the hassle of PINs and passwords, the system has the side benefit of addressing the upsurge of taxation fraud, which has been on the increase as economic conditions worsen. 3
More Benefits: Additional Security Expands Citizen Self-Service Applications That Can Be Offered The additional security provided by the voice biometrics has enabled Government departments to rollout a number of high security self-services applications that could not otherwise be deployed. One example of this is change-of-address, a high-value high-use application, especially amongst young and often highly mobile demographic (students for example). But whilst, implementing change-ofaddress as a self-service application is relatively straightforward, deploying is not. The problem here is that many identity fraud cases start with changing a victim s address. PINs and passwords just do not provide the level of security necessary to deploy such an application and prevent identity take-overs. But, as voice biometrics (like fingerprinting) provide a strong positive authentication of a citizen s identity, it now possible and practical to deploy such applications and streamline high use services. Government Secure Self-Services Pave the Way for Civilian Applications And it is not just in telephone services that voice biometrics is finding applications. Developers are increasingly using voice biometrics as a replacement for PINs and passwords to not only strengthen security as required in Government services, but enhance convenience and usability in mobile and tablet applications. These new government applications promise a bright future, not just for cash strapped Government departments to deliver more efficient services, but enabling them to deliver these services more effectively and with enhanced security in economically challenging times. 4
About the Author Dr. Clive Summerfield is Auraya Systems Founder and Chief Executive Officer. Clive is an internationally recognized authority on voice technology and holds numerous patents in Australia, USA and UK in radar processing, speech chip design and speech recognition and voice biometrics. As a former Founder Deputy Director of the National Center for Biometric Studies (NCBS) at University of Canberra, in 2005 Clive undertook at the time the world s largest scientific analysis of the voice biometric systems leading to the adoption of voice biometrics by for secure services. That experience lead Clive in 2006 founding Auraya, a business exclusively focused on advanced voice biometric technologies for enterprise and cloud based services. Visit ArmorVox.com for Clive Summerfield s full bio. About Auraya Systems Founded in 2006, Auraya Systems, the creators of ArmorVox Speaker Identity System is a global leader in the delivery of advanced voice biometric technologies for security and identity management applications in a wide range of markets including banks, government, and health services. Offices are located near Boston USA, Canberra and Sydney Australia. For more information, please visit www.armorvox.com.com. 5