[Rgclark]

Hacking your BRAIN: Scientists reveal they can find out your pin number, and even where you live - all using a cheap headset.

The scientists took an off-the-shelf Emotiv brain-computer interface, a device that costs around $299, which allows users to interact with their computers by thought, and is often used to control games.
The scientists then sat their subjects in front of a computer screen and showed them images of banks, people, and PIN numbers.
They then tracked the readings coming off of the brain, specifically a signal known as P300.
The P300 signal is used by the brain when a person recognizes something meaningful, such as someone or something they interact with on a regular basis.
It is released by the brain around 300 milliseconds after recognition occurs, hence its name.
The team used a picture of President Barack Obama to test the readings, and saw a spike of recognition from participants.
They were also shown their home, which caused a similar reaction.
'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?'
The team found they could find a person's home 60% of the time with a one in ten chance, and had a 40% chance of recognising the first number of a PIN number.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2194223/Hacking-BRAIN-Scientists-reveal-PIN-number-using-cheap-scanner.html


  Bob Clark

[CliffordK]

Interesting. 

Not necessarily reading the mind, but giving the ability to "probe" for data.  Although the accuracy is still somewhat low.

From the article.

The team found they could find a person's home 60% of the time with a one in ten chance, and had a 40% chance of recognising the first number of a PIN number.

Then later they say:

In the paper that the scientists released, they state that 'the P300 can be used as a discriminative feature in detecting whether or not the relevant information is stored in the subject’s memory.

'P300 has a promising use within interrogation protocols that enable detection of potential criminal details held by the suspect,' the researchers said.

Anyway, I could see making better lie detectors.  But, I'd hate to convict on 40% accuracy...  when one actually knew the answer.

[evan_au]

You may not get a strong recognition signal from just a single random digit.

However, if you presented a 4-digit PIN which matched the person's PIN, it might trigger a stronger P300 signal.

Of course someone might get suspicious (or at least, very bored) if someone attached something to their heads, and then started displaying thousands of 4-digit numbers.

[yor_on]

Another BS solution to 'lie detectors' it seems. Soon to flood the market. Strange that we can't realize that we all lie at times, and that we do it because there is no 'secure way' of finding us out. Just apply that reasoning at your neighbor too. We have 'half lies' 'white lies' 'gray scales' etc, and everything in between. We're not black and white.

[yellowcat]

Daniel Suarez used that idea in his technothriller book Daemon or possibly its sequel, FreedomTM.
There was a description of a computer controlled interrogation of a mercenary, I think that as well as the brain-computer interface they also had eye tracking.

[syhprum]

I recall the use of some such device in a wartime Dan Dare comic where the victim thought he was being put in the device to be tortured but was assured it would be quite painless.
 

[yellowcat]

I have just checked the Daniel Suarez book, that bit was in the second book ' FreedomTM' but he had them using a fMRI machine for the interrogation. The idea has obviously been around for a while, it is just that now the technology is catching up with the science fiction.

Last year researchers at UC Berkeley showed subjects video clips while in an fMRI, they then  developed models based on brain activity to try and recreate what was being seen:

https://sites.google.com/site/gallantlabucb/publications/nishimoto-et-al-2011