Forget TouchID. The future of smartphone security is in your eyes.
There’s all sorts of ways to lock down your smartphone, but it’s always a balancing act between security and ease of use, because while you don’t want your smartphone to be stolen and your identity compromised, neither do you want to spend five minutes unlocking it every time you want to check your social media feed.
There’s various solutions to this problem, from the simple passcode to more complex systems such as the “knock code” used on LG’s G3, the facial recognition on some Android smartphones or the various fingerprint recognition systems such as Apple’s TouchID.
Fujitsu’s thrown down the security gauntlet at mobile world congress, showing off an Iris recognition system for smartphones and tablets that it hopes to bring to market this year.
The Iris scanner works via a custom infrared camera and infrared LED that, according to Fujitsu, can be used at normal smartphone distances, rather than the very close scanning that traditional systems of this type require. At least, that’s according to Fujitsu.
Fujitsu’s released this video showing the system in action
So I figured I’d see how the prototype system works in action. At this stage Fujitsu’s prototype works as a sleeve around another smartphone, but Fujitsu representatives told me that they’d plan to implement it as part of a standard smartphone hardware once commercialised.
The plan, according to Fujitsu, is to include it with its own smartphone products at first, which means the odds of seeing it in Australia seem slim unless they strike up a partnership deal with another phone OEM.
As to the scanning itself, it’s fairly self-explanatory, with a simple guide to show you where to hold the phone. It doesn’t work well with glasses for initial scanning, which meant I had to peer at it somewhat blind while scanning me.
It also crashed out once, which is always the way with product demos, but once it had completed the scan it would happily allow me to unlock the phone at a glance.
As with any biometric system there’s the issue of data security to contend with. Fujitsu states that right now the Iris pattern is encrypted on the hardware itself, citing concerns with putting such data up on the Internet. At the end user level you’d have to trust that rather solidly, because while biometric data like this is indeed an excellent way to identify individuals, for that exact reason it’s quite powerfully valuable data.
Fujitsu stated that they’re deleting samples taken at Mobile World Congress, and I guess I have to take them at their word on that. I suspect the relevant authorities know who I am in any case.