14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is more or less the pioneer of iris scanners on mobile phones, as the company was among the first to introduce such tech on smartphones with Lumia 950 in October 2015, and now it looks like the firm is again exploring ways to improve it in the future.
The company has recently patented an iris scanner that could very well be hacker-proof, as it can better make a difference between a human iris and a high-resolution photo of an iris.
More recently, security researchers have discovered that such security systems can be easily bypassed using HD photos of the users enrolled to receive access to the phone, with both face and iris recognition systems proved to be vulnerable to such exploits.
Hacker-proof system
What Microsoft is trying to do is create a technology that takes advantage of three-dimensional structure of the human eye, with dedicated cameras incorporating elements that will be able to illuminate the iris before the scanning process.
These cameras will then be used to capture photos of the eye at different points, thus analyzing the 3D structure from multiple angles, trying to determine not only whether the user should be granted access but also if the scanning takes place on a human being or on a photo.
At this point, this new technology is still in patent stage, but Microsoft could use it as a way to improve Windows Hello on future devices. Naturally, one of the first devices that comes in our minds and which could benefit from a new iris scanner is the Surface Phone, a handset that we don’t know for sure it exists, but which everyone hopes to see going live later this year or in early 2018.
For the moment, Windows Hello is already an essential feature of Windows 10, so it makes sense for Microsoft to look into ways to improve it with more security systems that would make it hacker-proof.