Qualcomm Introduces its Iris Authentication Solution

Snapdragon 835 features Iris Authentication software solution:



Qualcomm explains:

"Due to the nature of information that needs to be captured for iris authentication (the iris has 225 points of comparison), an infrared (IR) LED illuminates the iris while the IR camera captures the iris image. What’s displayed, however, is a color preview captured by a front-facing camera. It’s a far less spooky-looking image, allowing for a better user experience.

Our iris authentication solution uses the Snapdragon 835’s camera security framework. Camera security is engineered to help provide hardware-based authentication and prevent the iris image from being captured by malware. This means the malware cannot fake authentication and replay the captured image into the Trusted Execution Environment. Both the IR image capture and RGB preview take advantage of camera security capabilities; each time the user scans her iris to open the phone or pay for something, the path is then hardened, so it becomes increasingly difficult for the image to be captured and used for nefarious reasons.

The iris authentication solution takes advantage of the Snapdragon 835’s processing power, which is engineered to deliver an unlock speed of less than 100ms. The solution makes quick work of the verification even if you’re wearing glasses, sunglasses, or even contact lenses. That’s because the iris authentication solution is capable of recognizing a variety of eyewear and extracting only the necessary information while ignoring the rest. And it’s designed to work well in indoor and outdoor environments so you can unlock your phone just as easily in bright and dark lighting conditions.

All iris authentication systems are vulnerable to attack by spoofing. For example, hackers might present fake iris photographs or videos of an authorized user and attempt to gain access to a device. Qualcomm Technologies’ iris authentication solution is designed to help withstand such attacks through an anti-spoofing mechanism known as liveness detection. Liveness detection solutions work to ensure that the iris being presented to the device is that of an authorized (and living) user."