Hackers backdoor the human brain, successfully extract sensitive data
by Sebastian Anthony, www.extremetech.com | August 17, 2012

“With a chilling hint of the not-so-distant future, researchers at the Usenix Security conference have demonstrated a zero-day vulnerability in your brain. 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…

“…For $200-300, you can buy an Emotiv … or Neurosky BCI, go through a short training process, and begin mind controlling your computer…

“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 … The researchers basically designed a program that flashes up pictures …”

Video Presentation: On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces
USENIX Security ’12, 21st USENIX Security Symposium
www.usenix.org | August 8-10, 2012
by Ivan Martinovic, University of Oxford; Doug Davies, Mario Frank, and Daniele Perito, University of California, Berkeley; Tomas Ros, University of Geneva; Dawn Song, University of California, Berkeley

“Brain computer interfaces (BCI) are becoming increasingly popular in the gaming and entertainment industries. Consumer-grade BCI devices are available for a few hundred dollars and are used in a variety of applications, such as video games, hands-free keyboards, or as an assistant in relaxation training….

“… We take a first step in studying the security implications of such devices and demonstrate that this upcoming technology could be turned against users to reveal their private and secret information. We use inexpensive electroencephalography (EEG) based BCI devices to test the feasibility of simple, yet effective, attacks….”

Their paper:
On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces

From the conclusion:

“… In this paper, we designed and carried out a number of experiments which show the feasibility of using a cheap consumer-level BCI gaming device to partially reveal private and secret information of the users. In these experiments, a user takes part in classification tasks made of different images (i.e., stimuli). By analyzing the captured EEG signal, we were able to detect which of the presented stimuli are related to the user’s private or secret information, like information related to credit cards, PIN numbers, the persons known to the user, or the user’s area of residence, etc. The experiments demonstrate that the information leakage from the user, measured by the information entropy is 10 %-20% of the overall information, which can increase up to  43 %….”

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