Samsung unveiled its Galaxy Note7 phablet, boasting an iris scanner that offers customers a new way to sign in to banking apps.

The South Korean vendor announced an expansion of its Samsung Pass initiative to cover iris scanning. It currently works with fingerprint recognition.

At the device’s launch, Samsung said it is working with a number of financial institutions, including Bank of America, Citibank, US Bank, KEB Hana Bank, Shinhan Bank and Woori Bank on integrating the iris scan into their apps.

The idea is that customers will be able to look into their smartphone screens, as a means to access their bank account.

The company argued an iris scan is more secure than using a fingerprint. As well as being used for accessing banking apps, the iris scan could be used to authenticate transactions on Samsung Pay.

The payments app features on the Galaxy Note7, as it tends to do with the vendor’s high end smarpthones.

Biometric concerns
However, David Emm, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, supplied some realism to the claims often made about biometrics’ capability. He said “it’s not that hard to compromise another person’s biometrics, such as fingerprints and iris scans, and it can even be done remotely”.

He pointed out that biometrics also requires the need to maintain a huge database of biometric data and other personal details.

Any security breach that leads to a leak of such information could have much more serious consequences than the theft of a password. Users can change a weakly formed password, “but we can’t change a compromised fingerprint or iris scan,” Emm pointed out.