Liveness Detection.
The capability to distinguish a live human present at the camera from a photo, video replay, mask, or deepfake — required for any biometric or IDV flow that resists trivial spoofing.
Liveness is the line between secure biometric deployment and photo-attack vulnerability. The 2024-2026 attack model has shifted: presentation attacks (holding a printed photo) are well-defended; injection attacks (intercepting the camera feed at OS/driver level to inject pre-rendered deepfake video) are the current attacker frontier and require defense in depth — device attestation, signed camera frames, server-side anomaly detection on capture metadata.
Common questions
What's the difference between active and passive liveness?
Can liveness detection defeat deepfakes?
Is iBeta certification required for IDV?
Related terms
In the guides
Biometric Authentication: A Practitioner's Guide to Fingerprint, Face, and Beyond
How modern biometric authentication actually works — device-local templates, signed assertions, liveness detection, and where the privacy story is real vs marketing.
Identity Verification and Proofing (IDV/KYC): A CIAM Guide for 2026
How to prove a real person matches a claimed identity at signup — document capture, liveness, authoritative-data checks. The 2026 stack, the deepfake escalation, and where CIAM ends.