Knowing me, knowing you: Human cognitive ability as a substrate for fraud-resistant digital identity

Jeremy Newman

5Feb
17:00 5th February 2014 ( week 3, Hilary Term 2014 )
Lecture Theatre B (Wolfson Building)

While banks and other organisations struggle to tell the difference between the real person and an identity fraudster, friends and family members who know the real person have no difficulty at all in distinguishing them apart. Thanks to several millennia of human evolution, people can perform this feat reliably, in an instant, even with partial information. Perhaps nobody thought to ask them before, but the means of doing so has now become technologically commonplace and commercially viable.

The aim of the New Model Identity project is to harness the natural ability of people to recognise their family and friends so as to eliminate identity fraud. It uses digital media, smartphones or webcams, and carefully choreographed social collaboration. The promise is not only that identity fraud be systemically eliminated, the rigmarole of "proving who you are" through documents, devices, PINs, passwords and pet names also becomes redundant, thereby neutralising the value of such items to fraudsters and making life easier and safer for the honest majority.

Speaker bio

Jeremy Newman is the founder and Executive Director of New Model Identity Ltd. As a programmer turned product manager turned software entrepreneur, he has spent the past thirty years working in the computer industry with a particular focus on the human-computer interface. New Model Identity is his second software venture since forming biometric signature firm, Peripheral Vision (later PenOp Ltd), in Somerset in 1990. He grew the company internationally, moving to New York to set up US operations in 1994. The business served customers in the insurance, banking, pharmaceutical and government sectors, and was acquired by a US public company in 2000. Jeremy is the co-author of 12 US patents covering electronic signatures and digital identity, and has spoken on electronic evidence, legal and regulatory compliance of e-signatures at over 40 conferences in the USA and Europe. Previously, Jeremy was a Product Manager at Acorn Computers of Cambridge, and before that he developed optical character recognition systems and document conversion software at OCR specialists, FormScan.