Silent Authentication - Best Practices

Bypass WiFi and Force Mobile Data Connection with the SDKs

Silent Authentication requires an active mobile data connection. If the request is made over Wi-Fi, it will result in an error. To ensure a successful request even when the user is on WiFi, Vonage provides native iOS and Android SDKs that enforce a mobile data connection.

Additionally, the Vonage SDKs handle HTTP redirects (up to 10) and manage timeouts (5 seconds, resetting after each redirect).

Front-end

Silent Authentication within Verify presents an easy and straightforward way to authenticate a user providing an enhanced user experience when comparing with other channels.

For new account creation use cases, the mobile application will not know the phone number of the end-user, so the phone number must be collected via an input field on the welcome screen.

Alternatively, an end-user that already has an account and is attempting a passwordless login will already have their phone number stored, at which point the end-user could be presented with pre-filled text fields and the only action needed is to “log in”.

During the Silent Authentication experience it is important to ensure that the user is familiar with the process and aware that the authentication process is running in the background. It is also important to ensure that in the event of a failure, both front-end and backend failover implementations are not cumbersome for the end user. It is recommended to present the user with a spinning wheel or similar feedback mechanism so the end-user knows that the mobile application is working on the authentication task. Alternatively, a new screen with the same loading indicator and additional text would achieve the same result.

In the event of a failure during the Silent Authentication flow, the application front-end needs to be adjusted so that the user can insert the pin code to complete the 2FA process. This code will be delivered via the failover channels.

Failover Scenarios

In this section we list all scenarios that can occur during a Silent Authentication request and advise failover implementations to ensure the finest end-user experience.

Some scenarios trigger an immediate failover to the next channel, however there are cases where the failover is only triggered after the default Silent Authentication default timeout of 60 seconds. Please refer to the table below, which summarizes the different failure scenarios: