The National Science Foundation recently awarded Binghamton University researchers a $900,000 grant for their work on a brain biometric technology project.

The four-year project has taken an interdisciplinary approach, combining computer engineering technologies with cognitive psychology. Zhanpeng Jin, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Sarah Laszlo, associate professor of psychology, are working together to explore individual human brain activity.

Their work focuses on using the brain as a biometric identifier, meaning as a distinct and measurable characteristic that can be used to label and describe individuals. By researching how to identify a person based on how their brain responds to particular stimuli, they can then use that information to map the brain.

“The idea with the brain biometric research is to be able to use your brain activity to identify you the same way that now your fingerprint can identify you on your smartphone,” Laszlo said.

Laszlo and Jin said that the fingerprint has become a wildly popular method of biometric identification but comes with the risk of being hacked into and stolen. Hacking into a person’s brain activity, however, is significantly more challenging than recreating an identical model of somebody’s fingerprint.

“As long as I have a picture of your fingerprint, I can duplicate that using some different materials, and make a fake finger,” Jin said. “That is pretty feasible.”

Because the fingerprint is more user-friendly and cost-effective, the “brainprint” technology is not likely to be implemented into mainstream society in the near future. However, for many high-security agencies, such as the CIA and FBI, the fingerprint is not safe enough and using brain activity as a biometric holds potential for practical implications.

In order to conduct the research, the researchers hook subjects up to a headset that measures electroencephalogram signals, or brain wave activity. A variety of images appear on a screen in quick bursts, and the subject’s immediate response is recorded. They found that participants responded differently to every image, to the point that a computer program could recognize the “brainprint” of each individual with 100 percent accuracy.

The grant money will be used to test the vulnerability of this, in order to find out how easily one person could emulate the brain activity of another. In order to test this, both a subject and a pretend “hacker” are exposed to synchronized flashing lights. By flashing lights at the same rate, the visual cortex of the hacker is stimulated to be active in the same pattern as the target.

“We are basically stimulating the hacker’s brain in the pattern of somebody else’s brain,” Laszlo said.

Currently the brain hacking technology has been able to increase the brain wave overlap of any two people from the natural rate of 50 percent to about 60 to 65 percent. By researching how easy it is for a hacker to emulate the brain of the participant, they can then look for solutions to enhancing the security of the system.

Jin emphasized the importance of collaborative, interdisciplinary work and stated that even innovations used daily, such as the smartphone, have to combine the technical qualities of computer engineering with the social aspects of user psychology.

“In the next few decades, the entire world will become more and more complicated,” Jin said. “None of the single disciplines can solve all the problems.”