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Digital identity

What Is Digital Identity?

Digital identity is a broad term that may refer to the digital representation of a person, organization, device, software application, or other entity within an online system. It consists of attributes, credentials, and authenticators that allow systems to recognize, verify, and authorize that entity. However, in the context of identity verification, we focus exclusively on digital identities associated with individuals.

What Are the Main Attributes Associated With Digital Identity?

Digital identity attributes generally fall into three categories:

Inherent attributes are a person's unique characteristics, such as facial features, fingerprints, or iris patterns.
Assigned attributes are issued by a third party or created for use within a system. Examples include a Social Security number, passport number, mobile number, username, or email address. Passwords are better classified as authenticators rather than identifiers because they prove access rights without identifying the user directly.
Accumulated attributes arise from a person’s activity over time. These may include purchase and search histories, login IP addresses, device information, account activity, and profile changes.

Together, these attributes help systems distinguish one digital identity from another, verify identity claims, evaluate risk, and apply appropriate access controls.

How Is a Digital Identity Established?

Organizations commonly establish a person’s digital identity through identity proofing, which involves collecting evidence and verifying that the identity is genuine and belongs to the applicant. A typical remote process may include:

Collecting identity evidence, commonly an identity document plus a facial image
Authenticating the document and extracting biographical data
Matching a live selfie to the document portrait
Performing liveness detection to identify a reused photo, video replays, or other presentation attacks
Creating an identity record and linking it to the appropriate credentials or authenticators

Banks, fintech companies, telecom providers, and online marketplaces often perform these checks during remote registration. Accounts created through social identity providers (Google, Apple, or Facebook) also represent digital identities, but they may not provide sufficient assurance for higher-risk activities. Additional identity verification may therefore be required before a customer can access payments, regulated financial services, or other sensitive functions.

What Are the Main Threats to Digital Identities?

Digital identities can be targeted at every stage of their lifecycle, from creation and verification to authentication and ongoing use. The level of risk depends on the security of the underlying infrastructure and identity fraud prevention and detection measures.

Main issues associated with digital identities include:

Identity fraud: the use of stolen, fake, or synthetic identities to impersonate users, take over accounts, or commit financial crimes
Poor digital hygiene: weak or reused passwords, unsecured devices, and failure to enable multi-factor authentication
Privacy and data-security risks: unauthorized access to, misuse of, or excessive collection of personal and biometric data
Technical and interoperability challenges: difficulties using digital identities securely across different platforms, organizations, and jurisdictions

How Can Regula Help with Digital Identity Verification?

Regula provides document and biometric verification technologies that help organizations establish and verify digital identities.

Regula Document Reader SDK checks submitted identity documents and extracts personal data that fill identity attributes. It reads the visual zone with OCR, parses the MRZ, and reads NFC/RFID chips in documents. There are more than 16,500 document templates from 254 countries and territories.

Regula Face SDK runs a 1:1 comparison between a person’s selfie and the document portrait. Active liveness detection requires the applicant to complete a prompted action, while passive liveness analyzes an image or video without an additional step. Together, face matching and liveness detection help establish that the applicant is present and matches the document holder. These checks can support identity verification during account creation, recovery, and reverification.

What Is the Difference Between a Digital Identity and a User Account?

A user account is a record that gives someone access to a particular system or service. A digital identity is broader and may include identity attributes, credentials, authenticators, biometric characteristics, and activity associated with that person. One individual may have multiple user accounts, each representing part of their digital identity.

What Information Can Be Part of a Digital Identity?

A digital identity may include inherent, assigned, and accumulated attributes. These can range from facial features and identity document data to email addresses, device information, and account activity. The attributes collected depend on the service, its purpose, and the level of identity assurance required.

How Can Organizations Protect Digital Identities?

Organizations can protect digital identities by using strong authentication, secure data storage, access controls, encryption, and ongoing fraud monitoring. Identity proofing, document verification, biometric checks, and liveness detection can reduce the risk of fraudulent accounts during onboarding. Regular security reviews and clear recovery procedures also help protect existing accounts from compromise.

Can a Digital Identity Be Stolen or Faked?

Yes. Criminals may steal credentials, personal data, or identity documents to impersonate another person, or they may combine real and fabricated information to create a synthetic identity. Phishing, account takeover, forged documents, and deepfakes are among the methods used to attack digital identities. Document authenticity checks, biometric comparison, liveness detection, and multi-factor authentication can help reduce these risks.

What Are the Consequences of Ineffective Document and Biometric Verification?

Ineffective document and biometric verification can allow fraudsters using forged, stolen, or synthetic identities to access an organization’s services. This may lead to account takeovers, unauthorized transactions, chargebacks, financial losses, and increased investigation and recovery costs. Organizations may also face regulatory penalties, legal liability, reputational damage, and loss of customer trust if their identity verification controls do not meet applicable requirements.