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Researchers Find 'Mind-Control' Gaming Headsets Can Leak Users' Secrets

Posted by Soulskill on from the and-whatever-you-do,-don't-touch-the-reverse-button dept.

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Usenix security conference in Seattle last week, a group of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, Oxford University and the University of Geneva presented a study that hints at the darker side of a future where we control computers with our minds rather than a mouse. In a study of 28 subjects wearing brain-machine interface headsets 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 sequences of numbers they recognized. For the moment, the experimental theft of users' private information from brain signals is more science fiction than a real security vulnerability, since it requires tricking the victim into thinking about the target information at a certain time, and still doesn't work reliably. (Though much better than random chance.) But as BMI gets more sophisticated and mainstream, the researchers say their study should serve as a warning about privacy issues around the technology of such interfaces."

24 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. If you thought nothing wrong... by i_ate_god · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...then you have nothing to hide!

    I guess in the future, lucid dreaming will be mandatory learning a young age so we are forced to control our dreams to prevent deviancy.

    --
    I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
    1. Re:If you thought nothing wrong... by Yvanhoe · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Technology-enabled telepathy is actually what I call cellphones today : you hold a talisman, another talisman rings and transmits speech. Just implant it if you want, but the magic is already done.

      --
      The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
    2. Re:If you thought nothing wrong... by mark-t · · Score: 2

      Cellphones transmit sound, and speech is just a subcategory of that.

      When I said "telepathy", I meant what a person is *thinking*. This could include spoken words, but it could also include what is being seen, or even imagined or remembered.

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    3. Re:If you thought nothing wrong... by N0Man74 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Technology-enabled telepathy is actually what I call cellphones today : you hold a talisman, another talisman rings and transmits speech. Just implant it if you want, but the magic is already done.

      You misunderstand the meaning of the word. Telepathy is transference of thought or experience. It isn't simply the transfer of voice, words, or even expression of ideas. The roots would be "tele" and "pathe", which would translate as "distant" and "experience" respectively. For your cell phone, I think "distant voice" would be far more accurate, or "telephone"...

      Though, smart phones with cameras might also fall under "distant sight", or... "television".

    4. Re:If you thought nothing wrong... by WTFmonkey · · Score: 4, Funny

      That, or Faraday-cage helmets will be all the fashion rage...

  2. So you better.. by second_coming · · Score: 2

    take off the headset before going to the ATM :)

    1. Re:So you better.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      And then somebody will make a law where it will be illegal to *not* use the headset!

    2. Re:So you better.. by Skarecrow77 · · Score: 2

      You know that it is possible to use facebook without sacrificing too much in the way of privacy and personal details.

      1. don't put much (or any) personal details up on your page. I think mine knows the city and state I currently live in, the city and state I was born in, who I'm married to, and my birthday. that's it. FB doesn't have my detailed address or phone numbers. It doesn't know where I went to school. It doesn't know where I work or have worked. It doesn't know what I'm interested in. I'm a member of no "groups". I don't "like" any companies, brands, or corporations. I run no apps.

      2. noscript and other addons means FB doesn't get to snoop on my browsing habits elsewhere.

      FB doesn't know anything about me that isn't public record already. Small price to pay for what is, when you think about it, probably the most underappreciated interpersonal communication tool ever developed. (which also makes you sad to see how it is used, when you think even further about said topic)

  3. Ve had Vays off making you talk... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Funny

    But now ve hav vays only of collectink unemployment...

  4. Meanwhile, on Twitter and Facebook... by QilessQi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...people voluntarily reveal private information like the location of their homes, what they had for breakfast, favorite sexual positions, etc.

    --
    Koans and fables for the software engineer
    1. Re:Meanwhile, on Twitter and Facebook... by Seumas · · Score: 2

      If you don't use Facebook and Twitter, you are suspicious and may be a terrorist, serial killer, etc.

      If you don't participate in the new generation of mind-control(and reading) devices, you are suspicious and may be a terrorist, serial killer, etc.

    2. Re:Meanwhile, on Twitter and Facebook... by __aaeihw9960 · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I'm not certain why this is modded funny instead of insightful. We have been programmed by popular media and life in general to devalue privacy.

      We've been taught that the only people who need privacy are terrorists or pedophiles.

      So, why would anyone need to go through the trouble of reading our minds when we've been pretty well conditioned to just hand out our personal identifiers without thought?

      It seems to me that if I need to know where you live, what your passwords are, and what you had for breakfast, I just make a NEW AND IMPROVED SUPER FUN SOCIAL MEDIA POWERED GAME!!!

    3. Re:Meanwhile, on Twitter and Facebook... by Yvanhoe · · Score: 2

      Or you may be from section 9...

      --
      The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
    4. Re:Meanwhile, on Twitter and Facebook... by tgd · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'm not certain why this is modded funny instead of insightful. We have been programmed by popular media and life in general to devalue privacy.

      Actually, you've been programmed by the media into believing privacy is something historically "normal". As a general rule in human history, privacy has been totally foreign. People always knew what their tribe, hamlet, neighborhood or building were up to. There wasn't an expectation of any sort of privacy, for anything from actions, to sexual activities, to hygeine. It just simply didn't happen.

      Privacy, as a popular expectation, has a lot more to do with manipulating people. Shame is a powerful method of control. When society convinces you that you should be embarassed about something, the person who knows it gains a lot of power over you. If everyone knew it, there's no power. Shame, and the associated need for a concept of privacy, were constructs that arise over and over as ways of controlling a population.

    5. Re:Meanwhile, on Twitter and Facebook... by kaiser423 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Shame is a powerful method of control. When society convinces you that you should be embarassed about something, the person who knows it gains a lot of power over you. If everyone knew it, there's no power. Shame, and the associated need for a concept of privacy, were constructs that arise over and over as ways of controlling a population.

      This is an important note to make. It's really the pass/fail criteria behind DoD security clearances (barring other big issues). They don't necessarily care that you slept with another dude in college or smoke some Marijuana or did X or did Y. They care about whether that knowledge can be used to blackmail/shame you into revealing secrets. If you admit it up front and have no problem with everyone in the world knowing that you did that, then they don't care either. But if you're a straight arrow and you're so absolutely ashamed of the time that you took an extra-long lunch break, but still charged normal hours then they're going to think twice about you. It's all about there being nothing to shame/blackmail/bribe you with in your background (and not having erratic/bad judgement). Not about how goody two-shoes you are.

      In this sense, social media makes the vetting process easier. Easy to check on your judgement good/bad, and easy to see if you're ashamed of something or not (aka, did you/would you post about it).

  5. I'd never thought of that before by flaming+error · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Thanks to this research it seems pretty clear that interfacing to the brain reveals much more than where you want to move a cursor.

    Anybody working with classified info won't be allowed anywhere near these things.

    1. Re:I'd never thought of that before by fustakrakich · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Anybody working with classified info won't be allowed anywhere near these things.

      For everybody else they'll be mandatory as protection against pre-crime.

      --
      “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    2. Re:I'd never thought of that before by middlemen · · Score: 2

      Anybody working with classified info won't be allowed anywhere near these things.

      But they also have lives... they might have cool toys at home like these headsets for playing video games...

      shouldn't we be looking at ways to really build secure software around these devices rather than prevent people from using them...

      it is a defeatist attitude where software folks instead of fixing their software say don't use it...

    3. Re:I'd never thought of that before by CodeHxr · · Score: 2

      The only way to be sure that any software around these devices are secure is to compile it yourself after analyzing the source code. Bonus points for writing the source code yourself.

  6. Just "gaming" headsets, you say? by Coisiche · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Now it seems to me that could make quite a useful interrogation tool, and I'd be therefore very surprised if such things are not already in use by constabulary forces.

    1. Re:Just "gaming" headsets, you say? by illaqueate · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is another one of those cases where the authors want to write about a science fiction scenario that doesn't exist like direct neural input so they do an EEG study that in no way resembles the scenario they are imagining. EEG is terrible for extracting information so there's not much to worry about.

    2. Re:Just "gaming" headsets, you say? by ledow · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Not watched the Mythbusters episode about the lie detector? Apart from the absolute rubbish asserting that polygraphs work (despite there being NO scientific evidence that they have ever or could ever work and vast evidence to the contrary - and HUGE problems with their experiment setup in the first place), they do a bit where they stick people in MRI's, EEG's, fMRI's, etc.

      Basically, it's hard to tell without a very good MRI scan happening *as* the person lies, real consequences if they are found out, complete amateurs being tested, no counter-measures being taken by them, huge amounts of analysis, etc. to say if someone is lying. But if someone doesn't want it to be known they are lying, it's almost impossible to tell from any external measurement.

      And if you can't do it with medical-grade EEG or room-sized MRI results, you can't do it with a gaming headset for the next 30 years.

      Hell, the US is just about the only "first-world" country that's EVER allowed polygraph results to be used as "evidence" in a court of law.

      It's just that shite, and unreliable, a method to detect what someone is thinking. And if you can lie automatically and convincingly, then you have nothing *TO* detect in the brain. At least until you can *literally* read people's thoughts as if they were sentences being spoken aloud about what they intend to do.

      Hell, our knowledge of the brain at the moment stems mainly from waiting for someone to have a bolt fired through their brain by accident and seeing what facility they lose and what parts of the brain were damaged. Above and beyond that, the brain's a black box of which we can only measure "activity" by way of measure electromagnetic changes. That's like trying to tell what colour object is inside a opaque box that you can't touch by waving a metal detector near it.

  7. Hm by rumith · · Score: 3, Funny

    I predict a sharp growth of tinfoil hat making companies' share price.
    Anyway, this technology is amazing. How long until we (as a species) can do the same from a distance? How long until such devices are then minituarized and cost so little that it is feasible to make them ubiquitous?

  8. Blurb Misleading by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you RTFA, you discover that they can use it to confirm that you recognize particular things, so the system doesn't "leak" secrets. They can only "steal" things they already know.