A novel technology being developed by a team of researchers at Binghamton University has delivered outstanding results over the ability to identify persons through brain scans.
A woman wearing an EEG headset. Image credit: Jonathan Cohen / Binghamton University.
The team, headed by Dr. Sarah Laszlo of the Binghamton University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, recorded the brain activity of 50 people wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset while they looked at a series of images designed to elicit unique responses from person to person.
The scientists found that participants’ brains reacted differently to each image, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer’s ‘brainprint’ with 100% accuracy.
“When you take hundreds of these images, where every person is going to feel differently about each individual one, then you can be really accurate in identifying which person it was who looked at them just by their brain activity,” said Dr. Laszlo, senior author of a paper published this month in the journal IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.
In their 2015 study, Dr. Laszlo and co-authors were able to identify one person out of a group of 32 by that person’s responses, with only 97% accuracy, and that study only incorporated words, not images.
“It’s a big deal going from 97 to 100% because we imagine the applications for this technology being for high-security situations, like ensuring the person going into the Pentagon or the nuclear launch bay is the right person,” Dr. Laszlo said.
She added: “brain biometrics are appealing because they are cancelable and cannot be stolen by malicious means the way a finger or retina can.”
The team’s results suggest that brain waves could be used by security systems to verify a person’s identity.
“If someone’s fingerprint is stolen, that person can’t just grow a new finger to replace the compromised fingerprint — the fingerprint for that person is compromised forever. Fingerprints are non-cancelable.”
“Brainprints, on the other hand, are potentially cancelable. So, in the unlikely event that attackers were actually able to steal a brainprint from an authorized user, the authorized user could then ‘reset’ their brainprint,” Dr. Laszlo said.
“We tend to see the applications of this system as being more along the lines of high-security physical locations, like the Pentagon or Air Force Labs, where there aren’t that many users that are authorized to enter, and those users don’t need to constantly be authorizing the way that a consumer might need to authorize into their phone or computer,” said team member Dr. Zhanpeng Jin.
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Maria V. Ruiz-Blondet et al. 2016. CEREBRE: A Novel Method for Very High Accuracy Event-Related Potential Biometric Identification. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, vol. 11, no. 7; doi: 10.1109/TIFS.2016.2543524
