See the destiny: attackers can get between brain waves and
hospital kit and it will get worse, IOActive senior consultant Alejandro
Hernández said.
Hernández says that the potential to copy, modify and delete
brain waves used in electroencephalography ( EEG) has already emerged, the kit
has already been hacked and the healthcare sector has taken little steps to
better protect captured brain waves.
After decades in laboratories and hospitals, encephalography
is introduced in lightweight electronic headphones and other tools that are
still largely experimental or gimmicky.
Clinically, EEG recording devices are a useful tool for
diagnosing seizures and sleeping disorders like narcolepsy.
Researchers believe recorded brain waves have the potential
to score murderers' mental abilities, create brain-to-brain interfaces where
conscious thoughts are transmitted over the internet and unconsciously enacted
by another person, or see neural-impulse-flown drones.
Before we get there, we need to lock EEG keys. Hernández
says a year's work showed him how to find gaps in EEG equipment and agreed that
registered brain waves would be considered confidential data and thus
encrypted. The researcher used a US$ 80 MindWave tool.
Pitched as a method to better evaluate how math and other
problems work for students.
Hospital-grade machinery without deep pockets remains out of
reach of hackers and requires intricate knowledge of which brain waves can be
modified for a given outcome.
However, Hernández claims that there are dangerous
vulnerabilities in the home and likely hospital kit, including data stream
stealing and application holes, and garden-variety man-in-the-middle and
denial-of - service attacks.
For a committed hacker, the necessary expertise is not rare
or unobtainable.
Last week, using the open-source EEG NeuroServer package,
the hacker demonstrated a live man-in-the-middle attack on his own brain
signals.
Years ago, nobody was worried about SCADA networks just
because it works, and a decade later we 're talking about [SCADA] security ...
I 'm noticing the same thing. EEG and now it's the best time to put security in
the technology," Hernández said.
If you can sniff cable brain data, replay attacks [such as]
can occur if there is no security mechanism between an operator and a drone
[or] interferes. with EEG data, so it's not the same as electrodes.
For a committed hacker, the necessary expertise is not rare
or unobtainable.
So how about EEG data neural advertisers, not spammers?
EEG data also raises prosaic risks. Hernández told Vulture
South about EEG file shares of an unnamed hospital, saying the server could be
exposed using the popular Shodan hacker search engine.
These attacks are part speculation, part tested, but all
based on the evidence that EEG, like so many emerging technology fields, has
left security in capacity progress dust. However, Hernández popped the mental
locks of popular gear within everyday hacker realms.
Bending mind
EEG's security issues are depressingly familiar results of
bad software design, Hernández said. ENOBIO EEG device (which resembles rugby
headgear rather) is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. He found minor
application vulnerabilities and ordinary EEG crashes, including Persyst
Advanced Review; Natus Stellate Harmonie Viewer; NeuroServer; BrainBay, and
SigViewer.
For example, some applications transmit raw brain waves to
another remote endpoint using the TCP / IP protocol that is not configured and
therefore vulnerable popular network attacks such as man-in-the-middle where an
intruder may intercept and change the EEG data sent," Hernández says.
Components such as the acquisition device, middleware, and
endpoints also lack authentication, meaning an attacker can connect to a remote
TCP port and steal raw EEG data. That same flaw can pull off the more dangerous
response attacks.
Hernández can not talk for hospital-grade EEG kit, which is
harder for hackers to access and check. But his research is bad news for those
who advocate EEG readings as authentication
The good news, the researcher says, is that the
vulnerabilities he has found can be nixed with known best practices: "This
is a big yes – best practices should be followed from a technology perspective,
secure design, and secure programming
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