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Your Brain Waves Could Soon Replace Passwords Entirely (fastcompany.com)
Wenyao Xu and Feng Lin, assistant professors of Computer Science and Engineering at University at Buffalo and The State University of New York, write: Our team has been working with collaborators at other institutions for years, and has invented a new type of biometric that is both uniquely tied to a single human being and can be reset if needed. When a person looks at a photograph or hears a piece of music, her brain responds in ways that researchers or medical professionals can measure with electrical sensors placed on her scalp. We have discovered that every person's brain responds differently to an external stimulus, so even if two people look at the same photograph, readings of their brain activity will be different. This process is automatic and unconscious, so a person can't control what brain response happens. And every time a person sees a photo of a particular celebrity, their brain reacts the same way -- though differently from everyone else's.
We realized that this presents an opportunity for a unique combination that can serve as what we call a "brain password." It's not just a physical attribute of their body, like a fingerprint or the pattern of blood vessels in their retina. Instead, it's a mix of the person's unique biological brain structure and their involuntary memory that determines how it responds to a particular stimulus.
We realized that this presents an opportunity for a unique combination that can serve as what we call a "brain password." It's not just a physical attribute of their body, like a fingerprint or the pattern of blood vessels in their retina. Instead, it's a mix of the person's unique biological brain structure and their involuntary memory that determines how it responds to a particular stimulus.
The article states otherwise. You change the 'password' by changing the stimulus (use a different photograph, for example).
Fingerprints can't be changed reliably (without surgery or self mutilation), that's true. And as such you could see them as a kind of username. And they should be used as such if the biometric sensor can't differentiate between the real you and a copy.
But when brain waves are used as described in the article, you can use them as a password, where your brain is the 'hasher' of your 'plain text' picture, and the 'hash' (brain waves) is compared to the recorded 'hash' in the database.