When you want to identify and monitor the device a user is using to interact with your site, the device fingerprint API can help. It’s a technique that’s widely used for analytics and ad tracking, but it can also be used to mitigate fraud.
The device fingerprinting API enables you to collect and encrypt information about the device of an end user, creating a fingerprint hash value that allows you to identify and monitor the device uniquely across sessions. The process is based on machine learning and can identify many types of devices.
You can use this API to identify and track devices with an Oracle Identity Cloud Service account. It is available as a Standard License feature. You can learn more about this feature in the Using the device fingerprint API with Oracle Identity Cloud Service document.
Device Fingerprinting is an excellent way to detect and isolate suspicious devices from your network, but it needs to be paired with other tools for success. Having the ability to combine data enrichment, IP analysis and tracking, and custom rules can greatly improve your ability to detect fraud.
For example, if you’re using device fingerprinting in combination with IP analysis and tracking, you can quickly identify a fake IP address on a suspect device and determine whether it’s associated with the device that’s attempting to access your site or make a payment. This can prevent fraudulent activity and allow you to regain trust from your users.
In addition, device fingerprinting can also be used to determine if a user’s device is hijacked or compromised by fraudsters, which can be important in a financial context. By detecting these issues, you can ensure that your website or app remains secure and complies with regulatory requirements.
The device fingerprinting process is fast and efficient, requiring a few seconds to generate and return a fingerprint for a specific device. You can then use this information to make further decisions about how to authenticate the user.
When a user logs in from a custom sign-in page, the SSO application collects a range of device details and sends them to the authN SDK for generating the fingerprint hash value. These include the device ID, browser type, version and platform etc.
If a device doesn’t have any of these attributes, a value of null is used instead. If an application has access to additional device details, it can also send them to the authN SDK in addition to the default set of attributes.
This information is encrypted and saved for future reference. You can then use the fingerprint hash to identify a user by calling the Identify User API with the device fingerprint value as an input.
InAuth combines device fingerprinting with fraud detection to help identify and report inauthentic content. Mass advertising campaigns, trolling, and attempts to automate content submission can all cause fraudulent behavior on Bazaarvoice.
The InAuth device fingerprint is a JavaScript-based solution that generates an encoded string that includes information about the user’s computer system such as OS, browser and more (no PII is exchanged or maintained). This information is used in conjunction with fraud detection algorithms to accurately identify and flag content that is inauthentic.