Prove Unified Authentication Overview

Learn about the components that make up the Prove Unified Authentication solution

Prove Unified Authentication solution

Prove Unified Authentication simplifies and strengthens your authentication security by automatically choosing the right authenticator based on trusted device recognition and authenticator availability—reducing friction while protecting against fraud.

Pain points

• Fragmented Systems: The current authentication landscape is a broken, high-friction patchwork of different solutions that fail to work together, creating a frustrating experience for users.
• Costly & Insecure Methods: Widely used methods like SMS OTP are proving to be expensive, unreliable, and highly vulnerable to fraud, leading to significant financial losses for businesses.
• Poor User Recognition: Existing technologies struggle to recognize the same user across different channels (e.g., web vs. mobile app) or when they change devices, forcing repetitive and unnecessary re-authentication.
• Flawed New Technologies: Next-generation solutions like passkeys and device fingerprinting are not foolproof, suffering from unreliable syncing, new attack vectors, and an inability to adapt to user device changes.
• Risky Onboarding: The customer onboarding process is often tedious and frustrating, which not only drives potential customers away but also creates security vulnerabilities for attackers to exploit with stolen identities.

Value drivers

1. Seamless User Experience: Unified Auth offers a “recognize once and everywhere” approach, allowing users to be identified passively and persistently across all digital channels and devices without unnecessary friction.
2. Drastically Reduced Fraud & Costs: By moving away from vulnerable SMS systems, it provides a more secure, multi-layered cryptographic key system that stops sophisticated account takeover attacks and significantly cuts operational costs.
3. Increased Conversion & Compliance: The solution creates a frictionless user journey that improves business conversion rates while helping companies meet critical security and data privacy regulations like multi-factor authentication and PSD2/3.
4. Intelligent Key Management: The solution provides a single, cohesive platform that intelligently establishes and manages a user’s cryptographic keys to create a unified, stronger authentication.
5. Future-Proof Design: It is built to accommodate the future of connected technology, prepared for the increasing number of devices per user.

Inputs & Outputs

Types of workflow covered in this document.

**Prove Binding via a Welcome Solution: **one of the solutions, like Verified User or Pre-Fill can be used to create a new identity, and bind that identity to a device.

**Prove Binding via Unified Authentication: **Enrolling a user in Unified Authentication to allow device binding.

Authenticate an Existing User: Allows Unified Authentication, or another Solution, so check for a bind and authenticate the existing user.

Prove Binding via a Welcome Solution

This path assumes that the customer has existing users.

Clients must batch enroll their existing users using Identity Resolution/Identity Manager such as via Verified Users or for batch/bulk uploads to pre-create the Prove Key.

Prove Binding (or re-binding) via Unified Authentication

Input parameters

Field	Field Type	Unified Authentication	Description
phoneNumber or emailAddress	string	Required	The number of the mobile phone. Acceptable characters are: alphanumeric with symbols ’+’. OR The email address associated with the phone number.
AllowOTPRetry		Optional
IPAddress		Optional	The IP address of the user.
SMSMessage		Optional	A custom message to include in the SMS for the Instant Link or OTP.
clientRequestID	string	Optional	Your unique request identifier.
clientCustomerID	string	Optional	A client-generated unique ID for a specific customer. This can be used by clients to link calls related to the same customer, across different requests or sessions.
clientHumanID	string	Optional	A client-generated unique ID for a specific customer that has been identity proofed. This can be used by clients to link calls related to the same customer, across different requests or sessions. The format of this ID is defined by the client - Prove recommends using a GUID, but any format can be accepted. Do not include personally identifiable information (PII) in this field.

Output parameters

Field	Field Type	Account Opening
result (i.e. success, failure)	string	✅
proveID	string	✅
proveKey	string	✅
reasons (GFP codes)	string	✅