UW Computer Security Research and Course Blog

For years there have been research going on in neurobiological field with attempts to decode images from the brain activity. In 1999, University of California, Berkley, has been able to reconstruct the video images from cat’s observed brain activity.

However, recently scientists in Japan decided to take the idea to even more advanced level (article). Researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories succeeded in processing and displaying images directly from the human brain. This sort of visualization has not been achieved before. Researchers’ goal is to apply this technology, and eventually be able to record and replay subjective images that people perceive, such as dreams or memories associated with objects and places.

This sort of decoding is described to be subjective. When people perceive an object, the image is converted into electrical signal that goes to the brain’s visual cortex. To decode such messages, first the subject has to train the device that is used for experiment, and associate object representations with the location and type of brain signal. Later, when such signals are observed, it might be possible to decode them, and this way to visualize the thought of a human.

So far subjects have demonstrated walking in a virtual world with the character controlled by brain waves. Similar gaming head sets are expected to appear on the market soon.

Also, researchers were able to reconstruct the image representation of the letters from the word “neuron” by decoding the brain activity of the subjects (article). To figure out people’s individual brain patterns and to train interpreting devices about 400 different still images were previously shown to the subject.  

Although some people believe that research is still too far from creating a colored quality video from brain signals, researchers continue advancing in the area, and think that technology “could eventually display on a computer screen what people have on their minds”.

Assets and security goals 

The human mind is a fascinating object. it contains, what we in the digital age perceive to be, terabytes upon terabytes of information, experiences, imagery, sounds, smells, etc… If we contrast this idea with our understanding of basic storage devices it’s very easy to see why it’s such a valuable asset to the person. For this storage device contains every piece of information related to that person; memories, thoughts and ideas be it incriminating or not. By being able to read the human mind against the person’s free will we’ve essentially taken away all human rights. Although the truth would be always exposed it would be at the expense of the personal and private thoughts.

• Privacy and reputation are the main assets to protect. Such personal device, as described above, should not allow unauthorized access. For example, an attacker should not be able to obtain such device and use it on a person without authorization from that person.
• Also, training data that is used by the devices should be protected and encrypted, so that it cannot be used to find out information about the personal thoughts.
• Device has to go through much testing to eliminate the possibility of glitches, which can cause harm to the human brain.
• Protect the device output from forgery. The transmission of mind-reading output should be protected from a potential intervention that would alternate the result, or replace them completely.

Potential adversaries and threats

Threats can come in many different forms, from the best friend next door who is curious about what you think of them to the radical foreign nation with an agenda to know all the secrets of your home country in order to more quickly and swiftly invade it.

• Anybody interested in stealing personal and private information is a potential adversary. People after money can steal information about password with use of this “mind-reading device”. It can be enough to mention the banks name, to make the human’s brain process password information, and, therefore, reveal it.
• There is also a threat of stealing national secrets. While nowadays people that know top secret information are often trained to go through tortures without having to reveal it, such a device could make any information available to the enemy. As demonstrated by the lie detector, it is not easy to control human thoughts to trick others.
• Social thread is another issue. It can be in the interest of one presidential campaign to reveal some surprising personal thought of their competitors to public.
• Government and police can be an adversary, and could try to use such device in order to prevent crime. Some officials could be biased, and believe a person to be a criminal just because of a illegal thought, even if the crime has been done yet.

Weaknesses

The main weaknesses of this new technology could be easily seen in its inherent design. Since it is essentially a mind reading device, the path is created to all the data stored in human brain. Whenever the technology becomes more advanced and contains private information, there is a potential threat of compromising it all. 

• Human mind is very complex, and an error on part of such device could be a serious consequence. If it is used by government to make a decision in court, one can be accused guilty of crime he/she didn’t commit, if device provides erroneous information, or if it is simply too complex to be decoded into a simple form.
• Device is a physical object that can be stolen, and used or studied for malicious purposes. Adversary can learn the devices vulnerabilities, or even build an attachment to the device that could, for example, wirelessly send the output to adversary. Similarly, adversary could add functionality to perform harmful actions on the human brain.
• This technology is subjective, as described in the article. What would happen if device trained on one subject is used on another subject? Could this possibly output the results that appear valid, but in reality are not accurate?   

Defenses

•  It would be valuable to know how this device is used, before creating defenses. If some law is created to allow FBI to use such technology on potential criminals without their will, how can the personal privacy be protected then?
• On the other hand, if it is recognized to be illegal to use this power against human will, then the defense could be provided with inherent detection of human stress levels. Thus, only humans with low amounts of stress or who are relaxed can have their minds read. With this in mind people who are being taken advantage of against their own free will, will not be able to have their minds read and thus be rendered useless. It is always possible to find a way to cheat the system, however, and with a use of relaxing drug this defense could be useless.
• Another defense could be done through some sort of authorization. For example, it could only be allowed for a particular device to be used by a specific person or set of people, similar to computer with registered users/passwords. Each person would have to pass a series of tests including biometrics, voice recognition, etc. This way if the technology is compromised it is hard to access it without authorization.
• Device could perform a series of brain tests to initiate the session of though-reading, to identify the person who is being observed. This could restrict a specific device from reading the brain signals of the person it does not have training data for.
• Since there is a potential error in interpretations of data, such devices should not be able to cause a court decision, or any kind of outcome of a judgment.
• Due to the importance of the device, it might be a good idea to be able to track its location, in case it gets stolen, or self destruct if detected to be out of range of permitted/home area.

With each advancement in technological field, there are more ways created to compromise data. The internet is one area that could be compared to the powerful device in question. There is a continued discussion going on about ethics, privacy rules, and security threats of internet. One can only imagine how complicated things could become with mind-reading device in existence.

It is important to note, that most of the responses and reactions to these news we observed online were “exiting” and positive. It was very easy to notice that most of the readers have not considered the potential problems of creation of such powerful technology. This is exactly what people should be warned about, since many users are naïve and do not realize how dangerous such technology could turn out to be for their privacy and reputation.

Of course, there are many advantages of creating these kinds of inventions. It can help to conduct communication with people that are not capable of expressing their thoughts verbally due to some illness. It could also potentially break the obstacle of communication between foreigners that speak different languages.

Even though the technological inventions are often exciting and beneficial, we should always remember about the risks, and use them carefully.