Technologies are presented herein in support of a system and method for performing iris identification and verification using mobile devices. Embodiments of the present invention concern a method for authenticating a user with a mobile device that includes steps for capturing imagery of a user's face, analyzing the imagery to identify the portion of the image depicting the user's eyes and segmenting the eye image to isolate the iris image data and encoding the iris image data in iris template. The present disclosure further describes authenticating the user based on the encoded iris template and additional techniques for preventing erroneous authentication caused by spoofing. In some examples, the anti-spoofing techniques may include capturing one or more images of a user's eyes and analyzing the captured images for indications of liveness based on reflection characteristics depicted in the imagery.