8 Reasons Why Your Fraud Solution Should Be Deployed At Your CDN Edge.

Brands have been relying on Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) for over 20 years with providers such as Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront and Akamai enabling decentralized delivery of web and app services close to the end user’s location. The benefits are well understood: speed, scale and security. So why are their fraud solutions still deployed centrally?

At Darwinium, we enable clients to deploy our fraud solution at the edge, where the content, users, apps, and devices are.We still support traditional methods, such as tag (JavaScript) deployments and API, but here are the reasons why we believe CDN edge deployment of fraud tools is essential.

1. Rapid Deployment

Traditionally, deploying a device and behavioral biometrics fraud solution meant individual instrumentation of web pages with JavaScript tags. While effective, it needs scarce resources from the client and IT backlogs may mean deployment timelines stretch into months when the threat is active today.

CDN deployment replaces code with configuration & clicks. It can be achieved in a matter of hours, vs weeks or months, and the fraud fightback can start immediately and without needing expensive client resources.

2. Whole Journey Coverage

The deployment cost and effort of a tags deployment often mean difficult choices need to be made on which journey steps to monitor, but this gives fraudsters places to hide. Just like on the road, when they know where the cameras are they will behave normally and when they know they’re not being watched they will strike.

CDN deployment makes deploying on all journey steps as easy as deploying on one. Why have blind spots when you can see everything you want to see?

3. See Intent, Not Just Event

Evaluating users only at fixed checkpoints like login and checkout reduces visibility to a point in time and risks missing fraud or generating false positives.

An edge-based deployment analyzes interactions from the moment a user lands on a site, and through every interaction they make, developing a rich assessment of intent and better detection of fraud.

4. Instant Decisioning & Deflection

Edge-based deployments enable real-time evaluation of user behavior the moment an interaction occurs, with real-time interventions tailored on a per-user basis. Trusted users can be given bonuses or incentives to shop, while risky users can be blocked or redirected in real time.

5. Collect Unique Data

Deploying detection at the CDN gives the ability to observe key edge network data, such as JA3 and JA4, which is just not available the deeper you go. Valuable insights into TLS fingerprints and configuration help detect malicious behaviour based on origin.

6. Privacy By Design

PII can be encrypted and hashed on the edge, protecting privacy and security and making compliance with data protection legislation easy to achieve. Clients can maintain their own edge storage to enable PII use in their investigations and analytics.

7. Resilience and Scalability

CDNs and edge networks can support massive global user bases without centralized bottlenecks. Fraud logic deployed at the edge scales effortlessly with traffic.

8. Local Processing, Global Speed

By analyzing data at the edge, often within the same geographic region as the user, latency is dramatically reduced meaning better performance and faster fraud detection.

So, eight great reasons why your fraud solution should be where your content and users are. CDN deployment makes life easy for you, not the fraudsters.