Forget Retinal Scans And Fingerprints, Brainprints Could Be The Biometrics Of The Future


Passwords suck. At least, the way we handle them suck. From users creating weak passwords to hackers compromising them using simple social engineering, it’s just not a very reliable method of handling sensitive material. And while there is a wide range of biometrics currently in use, there’s still no certainty about which one will end up being the most prominent going forward. It could be fingerprints, retinal scans, or even Brainprints.

In a new study published in Neurocomputing, researchers from Binghamton University in New York demonstrated the viability of brain scans as a means of establishing an individual’s identity. It takes advantage of the variations an individual’s brain responds to the mention of specific acronyms, allowing it to be used for distinguishing one person from another.

Called Brainprint, the study observed the brain signals from 45 volunteers, who were read a list of 75 different acronyms. They focused, specifically, on the area of the brain associated with reading and recognizing words, recording the reactions from each volunteer for each individual acronym. Each of the results were fed to a computer system, which was able to identify the volunteers with a 94 percent accuracy – a number the researchers believe can be greatly improved with more work on the system.

According to the researchers, the proposed security solution offers a distinct advantage over biometrics in that it can be easily reset. When a fingerprint or a retinal scan are compromised, for instance, a user can’t exactly grow new fingers or new eyes, so it is compromised forever. With brain scans, they can simply do another scan, reading a different set of acronyms, to reset a person’s biometric record.

You can learn more about Brainprint from the link below.

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4 Responses

  1. I am a robot

    For crying out loud!! What are you humans trying to do to your brains? You will never be able to read a brain without a robot helping you out. So why not just skip your brain and let the robot do all the work to begin with?
    PS. Seriously, this tech is kinda scary 😕 Hook me up to a computer and let it understand exactly what and who I am with almost a hundred percent accuracy? Isn’t google’s info collection enough to satisfy the whole planet?

  2. William

    This is incredible research and technology. What would the device look like size wise, and how much would one of these costs? I love this, and while I had my eyes on upgrading to an iPhone 5S solely for the purpose of getting the fingerprint scanner, perhaps I’ll just wait around for another year or so and get my hands on this new technology when it comes out. I am assuming it could then be hooked up to bluetooth and Wifi connected devices. That’s crazy that it can be over 90% accurate! Makes you wonder how long scientists have been working on this technology without telling us. Ive never heard of Retinal Scans for this purpose before, but through reading the product description can definitely appreciate the logic and science behind it. This is just, wow.

  3. Anthony

    How long do you guys this the government has had its hand on technology like this? ID scanning via the brain for example for computer and other base or database access? Just think, if they are going public with this science and technology, wouldn’t that potentially imply that there’s an even more advanced technology out now that the government prefers over this one? How did they go from using this technology to scan brain damage and activity, to identifying behavioral patterns and changing for setting and authorizing lock-unlock features on technological devices? Incredible how the world has, and continues to change.

  4. Dorothy

    is this the same sort of technology that people use to read whether or not you’re lying? i know thats usually known as a polygraph (machine), but in terms of brain-waves and changes in blood-circulation to neural activity, do you think its possible to observe and judge the likelihood of someone lying or being truthful with technology such as this? its weird that they say that you can lock/unlock things by matching your neural patterns, when scientifically speaking these are things that are always changing. i guess they are specifically referring to neural path-markers–which is actually all the more impressive!


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