Brain-Computer Interface applications: Security and privacy challenges

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) are becoming increasingly popular in medical and non-medical areas. Unfortunately, manufacturers of BCI devices focus on application development, without paying much attention to security and privacy related issues. Indeed, an increasing number of attacks to BCI applications underline the existence of such issues. For example, malicious developers of third-party applications could extract private information of users. In this paper, we focus on security and privacy of BCI applications. In particular, we classify BCI applications into four usage scenarios: 1) neuromedical applications, 2) user authentication, 3) gaming and entertainment, and 4) smartphone-based applications. For each usage scenario, we discuss security and privacy issues and possible countermeasures.