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Your Brain Waves Are a Password: How Your Next Car Will Check You're Not a Thief
cartechboy writes "And you thought stealing cars was hard today? You're facing locks, kill switches, LoJacks, OnStar, and more. But there's worse on the way: Engineers at Japan's Tottori University have developed a prototype theft-prevention system that uses brain waves to identify drivers. That's right: The system samples your brain waves, stores them--and actually shuts down the car if the driver's EEG signals don't match what's on file. It also busts drunk and sleepy drivers, because their brain waves differ from those when you're fully awake and totally sober. One non-Tron downside: If you want to drive, you have to wear a scary-looking set of sensors on your skull so the car can constantly reads your brainwaves."
"One non-Tron downside: If you want to drive, you have to wear a scary-looking set of sensors on your skull so the car can constantly reads your brainwaves."
In other words - none of this will ever actually see the light of day.
#DeleteChrome
What if I'm hugely stressed out because a tsunami or forest fire is coming or my critically injured child needs rushing to hospital or some such? If that changes my brain waves enough to prevent me driving, it would be unfortunate.
(To be fair, TFA says they're looking initially to use it on buses and armoured cars. I wonder if "masked man is pointing gun at my head and ordering me to drive" sufficiently alters the brain waves.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I'd be happy if the technology could be used just to detect brain waves from the driver and prevents the car starting if it doesn't detect anything.
Some of the maniac's I see driving around here are beyond comprehension.
This space for rent
"Hi Boss, I can't come to work today. I have a migraine. Yeah, my car refuses to start until I'm well again. I might be in this afternoon."
By bypassing this system entirely.
IANACT.
especially if you are out in the woods, you would have to walk home. (with your thirteen year old son by your side since you can not imprint a car with an illegal driver)
Personally I would prefer my car being stolen while I'm not using it than me not being able to use when I really need it. What I do to reduce the risk of theft is buy a cheap car. (well no car is cheap... less expensive)
Reminds me of the studies that show how some people's presence can make machines work properly, while other's makes them malfunction.
I was a mechanic for years and got tired of joking how I could fix a car just by showing up. In contrast, my X would make things go haywire. Whenever she went out shopping, her friends would always get in another checkout line or make her last since they knew something would go wrong with the register once she got near it.
This is a really bad idea. If I need to rush someone to the hospital it doesn't matter if I have two beers in me or if I just woke up. And I don't want my car telling me I'm too sleepy to drive -- and there would be no real difference between "just waking up" and "sleepy" anyway. Let's treating me like I'm all grown up and can make my own damn decisions about when to drive okay?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Let's see. My wife goes into labor at 4:00 AM*, and sleepy and excited I get into the car to drive her to the hospital... only to have the car refuse to start, as my brain waves don't match its stored template. Oh, yeah, that will go over well.
* That was, in fact, when my wife went into labor.
You lift the car into a EM shielded truck and drive to a EM shielded site.
Enter the stolen car and get your computer working on the theft-prevention system over a few hours, days...
Your car turns up tracker free in another part of the world with a compatible new entry system.
Trusted bodyguard/driver are now the new theft-prevention system.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Is there enough change in the brain waves of teenagers to detect their growth as being a different person? What about certain disorders that might not effect one's ability to drive or just aging in general? Also, why would it matter if you are drunk of sleepy if your car drives itself?
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Just a trick by the NSA to collect mind-reading data.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
One for each of my multiple personalities.
So now instead of cutting off your finger so they can open the fingerprint locks, which involves physical assault, the thieves can just slap an EEG on your head for a few minutes, splice into the wiring and play the recording back after bypassing the sensors. Or they could take advantage of the ability to record more than one person's brainwaves to make themselves an authorized driver (cars will have to allow this because more than one person drives a given car). Or they could use the bypass built-in for letting someone borrow your car (which again will have to be allowed because people do let friends borrow their car for a quick trip to the store) to "borrow" your car. This won't slow the thieves down much, all it'll do is give car owners a false sense of security and make them more careless.
Myself, I favor a "make the car undrivable" approach, eg. if the ignition is triggered without a door having been opened with the key or the keyless remote, the ECU disables the fuel pump. The car's still vulnerable to thieves who just load it onto a flatbed tow truck, but nothing can really stop that.
so I can't lend my keys to a friend. and when I have had too much to drink, even if I'm still within legal limits, I can't let my sober friend drive. and I can't drive my own car whenever my brain waves -- which ain't under my control -- are unusual. So if I'm the wrong kind of sick, or if I'm scared, or if I'm in love. If I'm nervous, or if I just lost my job or if my wife is in labour, or if I just learned that she's pregnant, or if my child is injured, or just about any emergency situation that I internalize emotionally.
And in the end, like all electronic locking measures, they don't actually control the engine, they only control the power button, or the key. Which means that it can be bypassed.
It also busts drunk and sleepy drivers, because their brain waves differ from those when you're fully awake and totally sober.
And that equates to how many cups of coffee in the morning?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Brain waves. That will prevent someone from loading your car on a truck and driving it away.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Think in Russian...
Error: no signal found
Table-ized A.I.
Supposedly an EKG can also be used as a unique biometric identifier. There’s a device under development with a release target of “early 2014” that uses it for authentication, and it’s just a slim bracelet rather than a crown of wires.
I have no connection with the company and absolutely no idea if the thing can or will work as advertised, I just happened to be reading about it right as this was posted.
because borrowing your car to other people should be illegal (get your own car, you hippie!)
They just think about another idea how to lock and unlock something but they don't think further how this new method can be broken. At the start of this year I saw an anime called 'Psycho', a society in which everyones brainwaves are observed to supress violent behaviour...to put it simple. The solution with which terrorists came up was a helmet that copied the brainwaves of the calmest and most balanced person of the area. That allowed it to run havoc but not get caught by the nearly fully automated police. Now I question, if there is technology that can lock and unlock a car by brainwave detection, how long will it take to create a device with this technology that just copies the brainwaves of the owner of the car and once he/she is gone you come along and drive away with it... Happy Research
... this apparatus is part and parcel of the car and that dismantling actually makes the car useless, people will find ways to get around it.
As pointed out by others the problem with biometric passwords is once it's compromised you're S.O.L. If someone manages to record your brainwave pattern how do you go about getting a new one? If someone gets a copy of your fingerprints how do you get new fingerprints? Etc....
Many cars are driven by more than one driver, such as a husband and wife, and possibly one or more teenage kids. This means that such a car would need to have the ability to store multiple profiles, so just record one profile while sleepy, one profile while drunk, one profile while fully awake and sober. And perhaps a fourth profile while in a state of blind panic in case you ever have to drive to the emergency room, and maybe one where you've just had too much coffee, etc.
The real difficulty is going to be when a song you like comes on the radio and the car stalls in the middle of the freeway because your brainwaves have just changed. Recording a profile for each song you like would no doubt tax its memory.
... Mood, Stress level, etc. If your hungry and so on.
And if your hungry it will start carpet bomb you with burger adds.
This article comes right on the heels of a previous one talking about how fingerprints will be used as a biometric to open devices; that article went on to darkly speculate about thieves cutting off victims' fingers to maintain access to stolen goods. Now comes this article, which would suggest thieves either decapitating people and keeping their brains alive in jars, or kidnapping people.
I just can't wait til some article comes along describing a new technology that allows someone to make an ATM withdrawal by tapping their testicles with a hammer, lightly for $20, harder for more.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
What if the driver is a guy and there is a hot chick in the car. He would never be able to reproduce his brain waves the way he recorded !
My anti-theft device is a rusty 15-year-old vehicle with 190+ miles on it.
Jalopnik has accumulated plenty of evidence that driving a stick foils car thieves, simply because they never learned to drive a stick.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Hey Bob can I borrow your truck this weekend? Sorry Fred, it only allows my brainwaves and I don't want to pay $2000 additional brainwave license.
It also busts drunk and sleepy drivers
I'm betting that poor fellow who's in jail for teaching people how to beat polygraphs can teach us how to beat the "drunk brainwaves" sensor too.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
It's not that we can't make the technology, it's that because it's not intrinsic to the actual inner workings of the device, it will always be possible to remove it - and it's likely that it'll be easier to do so than to either put it in or protect it from removal. After all, you can have the most complex lock in the world on your ignition, but if the car thief just pops the plastic case on the steering trunk open, they can hotwire it. Why would this be any different? It may very well defer casual theft, but in the long run, it will not deter dedicated thieves or likely be worth the additional trouble it produces for the legitimate user.
Like they say about computer security - if the attacker has physical access, it simply isn't secure - look at dvd encryption schemes.
In America, at least, a stick shift would probably be a more effective deterrent vs. car theft.
Parent post deserves mod points so badly. I wish I had some. Also, I wouldn't want something like this in a car anyway. At that point it's just about reverse engineering the way that type of data is logged. Knowing the companies we have today, there would be some type of global database getting 'hacked' on a daily basis for information.
Sure, a device like this could easily act as a "panic detector", failing to operate at the times you most need it.
It also makes it really hard to lend somebody your car.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I've never worried about theft of my '76 Chevy C-10. It has an anti-theft device called a carburetor.