Security in Brain-Computer Interfaces

Abstract

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have significantly improved the patients’ quality of life by restoring damaged hearing, sight, and movement capabilities. After evolving their application scenarios, the current trend of BCI is to enable new innovative brain-to-brain and brain-to-the-Internet communication paradigms. This technological advancement generates opportunities for attackers, since users’ personal information and physical integrity could be under tremendous risk. This work presents the existing versions of the BCI life-cycle and homogenizes them in a new approach that overcomes current limitations. After that, we offer a qualitative characterization of the security attacks affecting each phase of the BCI cycle to analyze their impacts and countermeasures documented in the literature. Finally, we reflect on lessons learned, highlighting research trends and future challenges concerning security on BCIs.

Embedded Brain Computer Interface: State-of-the-Art in Research

“…Some considerations about the limitations and challenges related to the BCI usage and applications are revealed even before moving to the embedded implementation of BCI technology [ 10 , 83 ]. Such limitations we found are: Inaccuracy of the BCI in terms of prediction or classifying brain signals.…”

“… Limited ability to read brain signals for those BCIs placed outside the skull. Number of ethical issues due to reading people’s inner thoughts [ 83 ]. The security of personal data not being guaranteed against attackers or intruders [ 83 ].…”

“… Number of ethical issues due to reading people’s inner thoughts [ 83 ]. The security of personal data not being guaranteed against attackers or intruders [ 83 ]. In some cases, requirement for drastic surgery.…”

Noise-based cyberattacks generating fake P300 waves in brain–computer interfaces

“…However, these studies only focus on partial aspects, missing the whole range of cybersecurity issues. To address these limitations, López Bernal et al [15] analyzed the current state of cybersecurity in BCI from the perspective of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the exchanged information. Finally, the study included possible countermeasures for the reviewed attacks.…”

“…The BCI life cycle is bidirectional since it can acquire neural activity produced by a subject and stimulate or inhibit neurons. Figure 1 depicts a reduced view of the full BCI cycle presented in our previous work [15] with the processes and communications performed in both directions. Since this work focuses on neural data acquisition (represented by the darker flow in Fig.…”