PixelPin

PixelPin provides businesses with a secure single sign-on authentication service with a 2-factor option for high value transactions. The news is full of data breaches and compromised passwords, so safer authentication is important to the continued growth of ecommerce and protection of financial accounts and information. The current solutions are falling short of properly protecting personal and financial information, and/or have a poor user experience. Authentication is a major friction point in the customer journey and our approach makes authentication personal and fun.

PixelPin is today’s successful authentication service due to its security controls, ease of use, reliability and speed. It eliminates the traditional alphanumeric password by using a patented picture-based approach with users choosing a personal image (e.g. a holiday photo) and a four pass-point sequence. PixelPin is a cloud based service that allows the user to input their 4 Passpoints from a client based on mobiles, tablets or the web. In most scenarios, all the security processing is performed in the server to minimise the attack vector of PixelPin at the client end. This should be compared with other solutions that try and utilise client-side security removing the need for passwords to be sent to the server but introducing other attack vectors in the process – the client being a completely uncontrollable environment. PixelPin’s ‘what you know’ solution works on all users devices without being dependent upon any hardware, and does not require a keyboard to enter complex passwords and codes.

PixelPin is implemented using OAuth2 and OpenID Connect for web implementations, and through a bespoke encrypted communication protocol for native iOS and Android implementations. The technology has been developed by a team with a strong security and defence background.