stratrisks.com

Source: Gizmag

Once the preserve of science fiction, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have advanced to the point where they can even be found in novelty headwear, which only makes an achievement of an international team of scientists more frightening. Using an off-the-shelf Emotiv BCI costing only a few hundred dollars, the team has shown that it’s possible to “hack” a human brain and pull things like bank details straight out of your skull.

For their experiment, researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Geneva and California (Berkeley) called in a group of Computer Science students. The students knew they were part of a security-related experiment but did not know the objectives or that they were being “hacked.” Each of these students put on a Emotiv BCI and were sat down in front of a computer that displayed a series of images such as maps, banks, card PINs, and so on.

This graph shows the P300 signal that results from a target stimulus verses the signal from a non target stimulus (Image: Martinovic et al.)

By tracking the P300 brain signal, given off when your brain registers particular kinds of stimuli as meaningful or useful, the researchers found that they were able to consistently reduce the entropy (or random data) in each variable they tested by about 10 to 40 percent, and demonstrated marked improvements over random guessing. In other words, the subjects were “leaking” information via the BCI that the researchers could then use to work out, say, the bank they used or where they lived.

Given the use of social engineering in many “hacks” and the many attempts to discover private information on social media sites such as Facebook, this study suggests that these devices could potentially leak even more information about you without you knowing about it.

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