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Comment by kirykl | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see brainwaves being used as passwords. And the fun accompanying the government forcing suspects to think "unlock"

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You'd need one hell of an accurate EEG in similar conditions to do this consistently.

That being said, give it a couple decades

You can detect strong signals with current consumer technology. One easy pattern is the SSVEP[1], which shows up as a spike in the brain signal's FFT at the frequency of a flashing light that the subject is looking at. Interestingly, it also seems to work with binaural audio.

It might be hard to tell peoples' signals apart with the confidence of a strong password, but individuals do respond pretty differently in terms of how long it takes to appear, how quickly it grows, how much of a spike is observed, small offsets, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state_visually_evoked_p...

Yeah, SSVEP has it's uses[1], but I don't think it would work well enough to identify various users with any sort of confidence. It would likely be easier to do with showing an image (or series of such) that would present people with a very different emotional responses. This could be loved ones, childhood homes, etc.

If you are curious in this stuff, I am pretty familiar with this stuff, and my startup[2] uses consumer EEG's regularly. Our single largest concern is actually signal correction due to movement / other environment factors[3].

[1] http://synaptitude.me/blog/a-quick-intro-to-ssvep-steady-sta...

[2]http://synaptitude.me/

[3] http://synaptitude.me/blog/using-computer-vision-to-improve-...

Pretty sure a simple suggestion of "don't think of an open lock" would do the trick. Or showing an animation of a lock opening. Even if the required image isn't of a lock, but of a "password image," the suggestion of "don't think of your password image" will probably conjure it up for most.

If that were the case it'd be fairly easy to add duress detection that just defaults the phone to password-only authentication.

Well, unless the cops use neural jammers or something. How cyberpunk.

Probably stuff like ecstasy would work- but that probably produces different patterns too.

Are there any features of brain-related signals that are biometric in nature?!

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