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A Study on the Feasibility of Using EEG Signals for Authentication Purpose

Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 8227)

Abstract

Authentication is to verify if one is who he/she claims. It plays an important role in security systems. In this paper, we study the feasibility of using Electroencephalography (EEG) brain signals for authentication purpose. In a general sense, there are three types of authentications including password based, token based, and biometric based. Each of them has its own merit and drawback. Technology advancing makes it possible to easily obtain EEG signals. The evidences show that finding repeatable and stable brainwave patterns in EEG data is feasible. The prospect of using EEG signals for authentication is promising. An EEG based authentication system has the combined advantages of both password based and biometric based authentication systems, yet without their drawbacks. Therefore, it makes an EEG signal based authentication suitable for especially high security system. Through the analysis and processing of EEG signals of motor imagery from BCI Competition, our experiment results confirm the theories stated in this paper.

Keywords

EEG machine learning pattern recognition authentication security 
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© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Faculty of Education, Science, Technology and MathematicsUniversity of CanberraAustralia
  2. 2.Department of Computer ScienceUniversity of Houston DowntownUSA

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