Fighting identity fraud on the Internet

Fraud on the Internet has many facets and causes enormous economic damage. One dreaded method is identity fraud. The victims of this scam are online shoppers as well as the operators of online stores. The economic loss caused by identity fraud is estimated at 36 billion euros annually worldwide. Until now, those affected have had no effective way of protecting themselves against the fraudulent use of stolen identity data.

The research project DARIA, short for "Data Protection Compliant Information Fusion and Risk Assessment for the Prevention of Identity Fraud and Mitigation of Default Risk", aims to provide those affected with a means of defense. The core of the project is to design a both efficient and user-friendly means of fraud protection on the Internet. To this end, the researchers are developing an online platform that provides better protection for consumers and providers alike in the event of identity theft. The plan is to set up a trustworthy online risk trust. Pseudonymized blocking notices are to be used here rather than the open comparison of consumer data. The basis for this is an anonymized data format that is suitable both for risk analysis and for exchange between companies.

Prof. Dr. Franziska Boehm's team from FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure is involved in the project as a partner in order to accompany and evaluate the development from a legal perspective, particularly with regard to data protection-compliant implementation.

The project is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for three years with a total of 1.5 million euros. Project coordinator is Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (Institute of Computer Science), another project partner is the University of Duisburg-Essen (Department of General Psychology: Cognition).

More information:
DARIA project 
IGR research unit