Messaging System Name Verification via Client Matching Scores
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Online messaging systems pose a security threat as unscrupulous actors can misrepresent themselves as genuine businesses, making it difficult for consumers to verify the authenticity of business accounts, leading to potential misuse of sensitive information.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a verification mechanism that compares a business's phone number with its associated name stored in users' address books, using a combination of client devices and a server-based system to determine the genuineness of the association through matching scores and machine-learned models, and providing visual indicators for verified accounts.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a verification mechanism is implemented to verify business accounts, then consumer security and trust are improved, but system complexity and resource consumption increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a verification mechanism that acts as an intermediary between consumers and business accounts. This mechanism verifies the authenticity of business accounts by checking multiple data points (business name, phone number, address) against trusted sources before allowing the account to be marked as verified. The intermediary verification process protects consumers without requiring changes to the core messaging system architecture.
Solution Approach 2:
The verification mechanism performs preliminary verification of business account information before the account is made active or visible to consumers. By pre-verified the business name, phone number, and address against trusted databases and cross-referencing multiple data sources in advance, the system ensures authenticity before exposure, preventing unscrupulous actors from creating fake accounts.
2Measurement precision
If verification queries are sent to multiple client devices, then verification accuracy is improved, but network traffic and processing time increase
Solution Approach 1:
The verification mechanism queries a selective subset of client devices rather than all possible devices, and requests only specific verification data points needed for authentication. By querying partial information from multiple sources rather than complete information from fewer sources, the system achieves high verification accuracy while controlling processing time and network traffic.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback loops where verification queries are sent to client devices, responses are received and analyzed, and additional queries are conditionally sent based on initial results. This iterative feedback process allows the verification mechanism to achieve high accuracy by focusing subsequent queries only when needed, rather than querying all devices uniformly.
Data Source
AI summary
A server receives an instruction to verify that a contact point (e.g., a phone number) is associated with a name. A set of users that have the contact point stored in a contact list on the server is identified and client devices associated with the users in the set are sent a name verification query. The name verification query includes a representation of the name and the contact point. The server receives a set of one or more matching scores from each of at least a subset of the client devices. The set of matching scores received from a given client device indicates a degree to which a name stored in association with the contact point in the client device's local address book matches the representation of the name. A determination is made as to whether the contact point is associated with the name based on the received matching scores.