This was explained researchers at the Usenix Conference on Security, held from
8 to 10 August in Washington State. Using a commercial off-the-shelf
brain-computer interface, the researchers have shown that it’s possible to hack
your brain, forcing you to reveal information that you’d rather keep secret. In
a study of 28 subjects wearing brain-machine interface devices built by
companies like Neurosky and Emotiv and marketed to consumers for gaming and
attention exercises, the researchers found they were able to extract hints
directly from the electrical signals of the test subjects’ brains that
partially revealed private information like the location of their homes, faces
they recognized and even their credit card PINs. Brain-computer interface or
BCIs are generally used in a medical setting with very expensive equipment, but
in the last few years cheaper, commercial offerings have emerged. For $200-300,
you can buy an Emotive or Neurosky BCI, go through a short training process,
and begin mind controlling your computer. “These devices have
access to your
raw EEG [electroencephalography, or electrical brain signal] data, and that
contains certain neurological phenomena triggered by subconscious activities,”
says Ivan Martinovic, a member of the faculty in the department of computer
science at Oxford. “So the central
question we were asking with this is work was, is this is a privacy threat?” To
extract this information, the researchers rely on what’s known as the P300
response a very specific brainwave pattern
that occurs when you recognize something that is meaningful, or when you
recognize something that fits your current task. The researchers basically
designed a program that flashes up pictures of maps, banks, and card PINs, and
makes a note every time your brain experiences a P300. The researchers found
they could guess which of those random numbers was the first digit in the PIN
with about 30% accuracy on the first try–far from a home run, but a
significantly higher success rate than a random guess. This brain hack can only
improve in efficacy as BCIs become cheaper, more accurate, and thus more
extensively used. “But social engineering could make that possible. Attackers
are creative.” What do you thing about a Brain Malware ?
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