Hacking the mind: 3 new brain hacks expose new realm of security & privacy risks

Brain hacking is a hot subject right now and has moved from science fiction into reality. At the Usenix Security Symposium, one mind hack looked to create better security and an “unbreakable crypto” system; another brain hack focused on threats to privacy by extracting secrets with brain computer interfaces. Yet other scientists have created a helmet  to make an Inception-like world in which reality can be manipulated.

With all the hacks and users continually using and reusing pathetically weak passwords, neuroscientists and cryptographers came up with an “unbreakable crypto” system that relied on implicit learning so your subconscious could remember a 30 character passphrase. However, the trick is that the password couldn’t be consciously recalled and obtained via “rubber hose attacks” meaning torture. The method relied on learning the password with a computer game similar to Guitar Hero, but that plants “a secret password in the participant’s brain without the participant having any conscious knowledge of the trained password.”