An article on Hacker News caught my attention this afternoon: Your Brain Can Be Hacked. Initially I clicked on the link because I thought it was going to be an article about some subtle psycological manipulation technique. Boy was I wrong. The actual underlying paper On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces has an even scaryer title, with brown trouser causing implications.

EEG devices for gaming? Perhaps I live in a closet but I hadn’t realised that such devices were even available on the open market, although I have heard and seen some of the research devices being developed for disabled people by various institutes and the US military use something like this in their high end jets.

Reading through the paper, I’m a little less worried at least for the short term. The technique discussed in the paper is not foolproof and requires some co-operation by the person the information is being extracted from. I guess this is nothing more than an application of the work that must be being done when medical versions of these devices are used with people with disabilities or brain trauma. The systems must be trained to understand what the user is thinking about, and I would imagine the training is done in this manner.

However the longer term implications are there. It is easy to imagine that a wily adversary could subvert a popular game and insert subliminal clues into the gameplay in order to trigger the revelation of some sensitive information. What’s worse is that a country backed adversary could potentially have access to a higher level of technology allowing for more sophisticated attacks. Perhaps thats nothing to be worried about, presumably a sufficiently determined country backed attacker would just resort to the rubber hose technique of information extraction. Although these trains of thought might just indicate that I’ve been watching too many programs like Spooks.

I’m not sure if these kinds of devices will become ubiquitous - right now its difficult to predict what the killer application would be for mass adoption - but the warning signs are there.