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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."

10 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 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".

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

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

  2. 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 __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!!!

    2. 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.

  3. 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!”
  4. 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.