Your next password could be your brain waves

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

Forget passwords and even fingerprint identification: What if your devices could recognize you and unlock based solely on how your brain reacts to different words? Apparently, not only is it possible, but it has been successfully demonstrated by a researchers in Spain.

According to Engadget reports, postdoctoral researcher Blair C. Armstrong and colleagues from the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language observed the brain signals of 45 people as those subjects read a list of 45 acronyms such as DVD and FBI. They found that the reactions of their brains different enough for a system to correctly identify them 94 percent of the time.

These results suggest that brainwaves could ultimately be a way for security systems to verify a person’s identity, New Scientist explained, and although the 94 percent accuracy sounds good, it is not yet secure enough to use the technology to guard a room or a computer that contains top-secret intel. However, Armstrong told the website that it was a promising start.

Promising, but not quite ready for real-world use

While this does not mar the first time that a technique for identifying a person based on their brain’s electrical signals has been developed, New Scientist explained that this type of biometric authentication would be able to continuously monitor a person’s identity rather than just being used as a one-off test, such as facial or fingerprint recognition.

In addition, this type of system could theoretically make it possible for a person to interact with more than one computer system at the same time, or possibly even with some intelligent objects, without having to repeatedly enter passwords for each different device.

Since brain signals are typically difficult to analyze, Armstrong’s team focused on the part of the brain associated with reading and recognition words, according to Engadget. This part of the brain handles the definition of a word – a process that is differs in subtle ways from one person to another. Currently, the process requires electrodes to work, however.

For that reason, while the technique some promise, it still needs to be refined further to be put to work in the real world. However, as Kevin Bowyer, a professor and the chair of the University of Notre Dame Department of Computer Science and Engineering, told New Scientist, Armstrong’s work “stretches the boundaries of how we think about biometrics.”

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