Reading in your mind is now possible

by: Ashley
  
Recently, researchers from UC Berkeley School of Information under the lead of the professor John Chuang have discovered an alternative to traditional passwords : it is now possible to extract these information directly from your head. In fact, a wireless headset which costs only 100 dollars will be placed on your head with a sort of microphone stuck on your forehead, and read your mind. They use electroencephalography sensors. Everyone emits specific brainwaves that are different from other people. These brainwaves will identify you every time you would like to be connected on your e-mail box for example. They called it pass-thought. In that way, you don't have anymore to be afraid of forgetting your passwords.

    This concept has an error rate below one percent which is really low. They think that it is more accurate than other sophisticated bio-metric authentication systems like fingerprint or iris scan which are described as slow, intrusive and expensive, and, of course, safer than common typed passwords which could be hacked quite easily.

    To test their prototype, they ask the participants to realise some tasks like choosing a secret, color counting, singing a song or focusing on their own breathing. The participants didn't seem to mind doing it every day. However, the users find hard to imagine doing sports without moving at all.

    They presented their finding at the 2013 Workshop on usable Security at the Seventeenth international Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security in Okinawa in Japan.

    In my opinion, it seems more convenient, but I believe that it is more intrusive that any bio-metric authentication system because after all, the system will read directly in your mind. Also, what will happen if some evil-minded person uses this device to hack your mind and extract any information they want about your life ? I think we should be careful with this sort of new technology. I am maybe too pessimistic. The future will tell us what will happen.

    In the meantime, what do you think ? Would you be okay to develop this new alternative to replace your passwords ?

   For information, another similar technology has been discovered by Japanese scientists at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories who claim that they can read in people's dreams using magnetic resonance imaging.