Face Authenticate

Start here

This is an introductory guide and overview for the Face Authenticate product.

Face Authenticate is available via the following Onfido SDKs:

You'll find API documentation separately.

Introduction

Onfido Face Authenticate enables the repeat re-verification of end users who have previously been verified by Onfido.

Face Authenticate offers a fully automated, real time comparison between an applicant’s face scan and their most recent facial image recorded in your Onfido account. The authentication process uses patented technology to create a 3D facemap of the applicant which verifies if the faces match and it is a real person.

There are a number of use cases, including:

account recovery
approving high risk transactions
enabling access to services (e.g. car rental)

Overview of steps

The following diagram illustrates the overall flow for Face Authenticate.

Note: Each applicant you run Face Authenticate against must have previously been verified using one of our Facial Similarity reports. You must reuse the same applicant_id used for the initial check when requesting Authentication attempts. This ensures that all attempts are associated with the same end user.

Auth overview of steps

You'll find more detailed information on all the steps in our API reference.

Result logic

An Authentication attempt can either succeed or fail.

The result is indicated in the parameter success which is returned as true for success or false for failure.

Authentication is only successful if both of the following are true:

face features match the applicant’s enrolment selfie
face features indicate it’s a legitimate photo