Thilo Habrich’s research while affiliated with University of Mannheim and other places

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Publications (2)


Performance and Usability Evaluation of Brainwave Authentication Techniques with Consumer Devices
  • Article

January 2023

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59 Reads

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8 Citations

ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security

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Matin Fallahi

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Thilo Habrich

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[...]

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Thorsten Strufe

Brainwaves have demonstrated to be unique enough across individuals to be useful as biometrics. They also provide promising advantages over traditional means of authentication, such as resistance to external observability, revocability, and intrinsic liveness detection. However, most of the research so far has been conducted with expensive, bulky, medical-grade helmets, which offer limited applicability for everyday usage. With the aim to bring brainwave authentication and its benefits closer to real world deployment, we investigate brain biometrics with consumer devices. We conduct a comprehensive measurement experiment and user study that compare five authentication tasks on a user sample up to 10 times larger than those from previous studies, introducing three novel techniques based on cognitive semantic processing. Furthermore, we apply our analysis on high-quality open brainwave data obtained with a medical-grade headset, to assess the differences. We investigate both the performance, security, and usability of the different options and use this evidence to elicit design and research recommendations. Our results show that it is possible to achieve Equal Error Rates as low as 7.2% (a reduction between 68-72% with respect to existing approaches) based on brain responses to images with current inexpensive technology. We show that the common practice of testing authentication systems only with known attacker data is unrealistic and may lead to overly optimistic evaluations. With regard to adoption, users call for simpler devices, faster authentication, and better privacy.


Poster: Towards a Framework for Assessing Vulnerabilities of Brainwave Authentication Systems

November 2019

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47 Reads

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5 Citations

In the quest to devise new alternatives to password-based authentication, behavioral biometrics have become more and more appealing due to the improved usability that comes with their unobtrusiveness. One such type of biometric are brainwaves, which can be nowadays easily measured and used to prove a person's identity. Given the potential for this technology to be adopted in the near future, it is paramount to analyze its security implications. Furthermore, recent advances in brain computer interfaces make feasible the usage of brainwaves to prove users' identity. This work presents a comprehensive framework for assessing the vulnerabilities of brainwave authentication systems, incorporating new attack vectors that target specific features of brain biometrics. Resting on this theoretical groundwork, we analyze the existing literature on attacks and countermeasures, identifying gaps and providing a foundation for future research. Furthermore, we evaluated a subset of attacks identified through the framework and report our preliminary results.

Citations (2)


... Brainwave authentication has gained attention for its hands-free operation, which enhances usability in devices like XR systems [10,31]. It resists shoulder surfing by relying on distinct neural activity patterns rather than observable actions or physical characteristics [3]. Additionally, brainwavebased systems can enable continuous authentication, improving security by monitoring user identity in active tracking [37]. ...

Reference:

Advancing Brainwave-Based Biometrics: A Large-Scale, Multi-Session Evaluation
Performance and Usability Evaluation of Brainwave Authentication Techniques with Consumer Devices
  • Citing Article
  • January 2023

ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security

... B IOMETRICS authentication [1] refers to the use of a person's unique physiological or behavioural characteristics, such as fingerprints, finger veins, faces, or gaits, to verify his/her identity. While biometric authentication offers many advantages over traditional authentication methods such as secret authentication, there are still some weaknesses of biometric authentication in terms of accuracy and security/privacy [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. First, false positives (accepting an unauthorized person as a valid user) and false negatives (rejecting a valid user) are major concerns due to the inherent fuzziness of biometric data. ...

Poster: Towards a Framework for Assessing Vulnerabilities of Brainwave Authentication Systems
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • November 2019