F5 updated its application security portfolio with three products that the vendor says boost app security and protect against fraud while reducing user friction.

About a year ago, F5 closed its $1 billion Shape Security acquisition, and that deal brought Shape’s cloud-based application security software and artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics platform in house. The three new products, Device ID, Shape Recognize, and Shape AI Fraud Engine (SAFE), use Shape’s core technologies.

They also reflect F5’s growing push into application security. Shortly before it acquired Shape, F5 bought web server company Nginx. And a year ago F5 paid $500 million for application security startup Volterra.

The first new product, Device ID, is a real-time device identifier that helps customers better understand the devices interacting with their websites and mobile apps, and if they are good devices or fraud attempts, said F5’s AI chief Shuman Ghosemajumder, who previously was CTO at Shape.

Device ID uses “a combination of the various Shape signals and machine learning that allows us to create a high-precision device identifier,” he explained. This helps customers “identify when you’ve got the same device that’s coming back and engaged in fraud and being able to track those types of activities with greater resolution.” Device ID is now available to all F5 customers at no charge.

The second product, Shape Recognize, makes it easier to authenticate known, trusted users.

“Shape Recognize allows us to be able to understand when you’ve got a very trusted user that doesn’t need to be shown a multi-factor authentication challenge repeatedly, which we’ve discovered actually results in a reduction in revenue to websites without any improvement in security,” Ghosemajumder said. It uses telemetry that Shape collects across its network to identify legitimate users in real-time using analytics as well as behavioral and contextual awareness.

“So what Recognize allows us to do is actually something that typically doesn’t happen in the security industry, which is removing friction while actually increasing security,” Ghosemajumder said. “We’re able to use all of that data from the Shape system to be able to create an experience where the user experiences less friction, but now all of a sudden, the website or the mobile app has greater assurance that they’re trusted.”

The third product, Shape AI Fraud Engine (SAFE), uses a closed-loop machine learning approach to detect and block fraud in real time. “And what this allows us to do is take feedback from customers, to be able to train machine learning models that allow us to use all of our unique features to identify forms of fraud that our customers are looking for, but now we can identify them much earlier in the cycle and we can identify them across the entire user journey. So not just at the authentication stage, but in whatever interaction that particular user or account is engaged in throughout the website or mobile app,” Ghosemajumder said.

SAFE, which is a managed service, identifies and stops account takeover, malicious account origination, exploitation of stolen accounts, and other fraudulent activities, the company claims.