This blog post explores whether iris recognition technology can become the best security system for protecting privacy in the 21st century.
The 21st century is, above all, an era that prioritizes privacy. As the information society advances, protecting personal privacy has become a more critical issue than ever before. In the past, protecting important personal information was often sufficient with just a password composed of numbers or letters. However, as cybercrime has become increasingly sophisticated and various hacking techniques have emerged, security technology has also had to evolve accordingly. Biometric recognition technology emerged during this process. Advances in science and technology now allow for safer methods of protecting personal information, and among these, biometric recognition is considered one of the most secure methods.
Among the biometric methods currently in use, fingerprints are the most representative. Fingerprints are widely used for identity verification in various situations, such as immigration checks or driver’s license issuance. However, fingerprint recognition has several drawbacks. Fingerprints can be vulnerable to external damage, and concerns have been raised about the potential for manipulating fingerprints for criminal purposes. Iris recognition technology emerged to address these issues. Iris recognition offers higher security than traditional fingerprint recognition and is increasingly being adopted in high-security locations such as airports, research facilities, and government agencies. Since 2016, iris recognition has also been implemented in some smartphones, establishing itself as a technology easily accessible in everyday life.
What is the principle behind iris recognition technology? First, the iris is the tissue located around the pupil of the eye, responsible for controlling the amount of light entering the eye by adjusting the pupil’s size. It functions like a camera’s aperture, making the pupil smaller in bright environments and larger in dark ones. Even more interesting is the fact that iris information is formed in childhood and remains unchanged throughout a person’s lifetime. Even the irises of the same person’s left and right eyes have distinct patterns, making iris recognition a compelling security technology.
The iris recognition process is as follows. First, the eye is photographed using faint infrared light to capture the iris’s complex pattern as a digital image. During this step, the camera minimizes light reflection from the cornea to clearly record the iris pattern. The captured image is then converted into digital data. Through mathematical processing, the system extracts the individual’s unique characteristics. This is called a ‘digital template’. The iris recognition system stores this template in a database and later compares the user’s iris information to verify their identity.
Iris recognition technology has also begun to be applied in mobile phones. The Galaxy Note7, first introduced in 2016, garnered significant attention as the first smartphone equipped with iris recognition. To implement iris recognition, Samsung Electronics installed a dedicated camera and infrared LED at the top of the device. Since recognition rates can vary depending on the iris color or surrounding environment under typical visible light conditions, the infrared LED enables more accurate recognition of the iris pattern. This technology has gradually advanced and is now applied to various smartphones, further enhancing user privacy and security.
Iris recognition offers numerous advantages. First, the iris is located deep within the eye, protected by the eyelid, making it less susceptible to damage and less affected by external environmental factors. Second, each person possesses a unique iris pattern, enabling highly accurate individual identification without physical contact. This makes it a valuable security method, even during infectious disease outbreaks. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, the iris is formed after 18 months of age and remains unchanged for life. This means the iris can be utilized as biometric information that is even more unique and unchanging than fingerprints. No two people share the same iris pattern; even identical twins have different iris patterns.
The error rate for iris recognition is extremely low. While fingerprint recognition has an error rate of 1 in 10,000, iris recognition has an error rate of 1 in 10 million when using one eye and 1 in 1 trillion when using both eyes. Furthermore, because iris recognition is based on biological signals, it cannot be performed on deceased individuals or artificially created eyes. This factor further enhances the reliability of security.
However, iris recognition technology is not without its drawbacks. For instance, recognition rates can drop in environments with strong sunlight. Furthermore, recognition becomes difficult at greater distances from the iris scanner, and the requirement for the user to precisely align their eye with the scanner is an inconvenient factor. Additionally, when using iris recognition on smartphones, the process requires waking the screen, potentially making it slower than fingerprint recognition.
Nevertheless, iris recognition is currently regarded as the most secure security technology available. It is already widely used in fields requiring high-level security, and more advanced forms of biometric recognition technology are expected to emerge in the future. As technology advances, security is becoming an increasingly important topic in our daily lives. Expectations are growing about what the next generation of security technology, which will lead this change, will look like and how it will protect our privacy.
