Seriously, this registers barely above a lie detector for me. They have to just guess my password and then, when they get it right, they'll record a different brainwave pattern? Sounds simple enough. Okay, my passwords typically consist of several words with some numbers thrown in. I wager we can go through 40 trials each minute for 16 hours each day. How many millions of years do you have?
Except the human brain has pattern recognition. It's possible that these waves are elicited if your password is simply close to the actual one, maybe the first couple letters or somesuch. Then the algorithm could use that information to narrow down the range it has to check; essentially a game of warm/cold.
This might be completely off, since the article is pretty vague, but it seems like a possibility to me.
It's essentially the same idea, except that you elicit a particular brainwave signal only when recognizing something you've already seen. I believe India experimented with using it in murder trials a few years ago-- if the accused elicits a P300 upon seeing the actual murder weapon amongst a line-up of dozens of other weapons, they must know a priori how the murder took place and hence be guilty. Interesting times and there really are applications that could benefit from this kind of analysis.
Between Paul Ekman's work in behavioral science and detecting a persons pulse rate from video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONZcjs1Pjmk), it seems like one could have a pretty decent "lie detector" running on a smart phone.
Sure it's equivalent to brute force now, but it's not like the brain is doing a cryptographic hash. I would not be suprised if a bit more development made it possible to break passwords one character at a time or something on that order of complexity.
Yeah I know, and that's probably what they did here or something like it. But this article seems a bit... off. What is this:
These headsets use EEG technology to detect and acquire neuro-signals - brainwaves, and are already popular with gamers who simply "think" about their next move.
They claim a 15-40% decrease in entropy over a pure brute force attack. The blip about 'already popular' isn't there. That said, there are gaming oriented neural interfaces on the market. An earlish one for example [1]. They're all basically just commoditized EEG machines. Would not say that they're 'popular with gamers', but they're out there.
Seriously, this registers barely above a lie detector for me. They have to just guess my password and then, when they get it right, they'll record a different brainwave pattern? Sounds simple enough. Okay, my passwords typically consist of several words with some numbers thrown in. I wager we can go through 40 trials each minute for 16 hours each day. How many millions of years do you have?