Attacks to biometric data are the primary danger to the self-security of biometrics. To improve the iris feature template data security, a data hiding approach based on bit streams is proposed, in which an iris feature template is embedded into a face image. The proposed approach is applicable to present dominant techniques of iris recognition. With the low computation cost and the zero decoding-error-rate, this data hiding approach, embedding target biometric data into other biometric data for improving the security of target data in identity recognition, data storage and transmission, can deceive attackers more effectively. Furthermore, it does not degrade the iris recognition performances. Experimental results prove that the proposed approach can be used to protect iris feature templates and enhance the security of the iris recognition system itself.