BG - Neurosecurity: where Infosec meets Brain-machine Interface - Ben D. Sawyer & Matt Canham

hello everyone welcome a few announcements before we get started first off I'd like to thank our sponsors particularly our inner circle sponsors critical stack and Val mail as well as some of our stellar sponsors Ana's on blackberry and silence as a whole we have a huge out of sponsors this year and we really could not do this conference without them they're part of what makes it possible so please go out there see some sponsors thank them please silence your cellphone's at the end if there are questions I will be walking around with a microphone make sure to speak your question into that microphone so that people at home can hear you and that's all the

announcements I have so without further ado here are Ben Sawyer and Matt cannon [Applause] all right thank you very much before we start I just want to say that whatever we say today is not the opinion or position of the US Army so don't hold them responsible hi I am dr. Ben Schneider this is dr. McKenna we're with the laboratory for autonomy brain exchange at the University of Central Florida and today we'd like to have you look at a problem that we've been looking at for some time and we're here actually to enlist the opinion and the help of this community in continuing and identifying the direction of our research today we'll be talking about

InfoSec as it relates to brain machine interface and the very near future and in fact present so Lab X or the laboratory for autonomy brain exchange is a group that really looks to engineer systems that optimize data flow between humans and machines basically get away from the slowest possible thing which is poking a screen with this chunk of meat and get anything faster or better we do that through neuro engineering so narrow engineering basically means hooking up computers to the brain or to pieces that touch the brain and using that to move things faster than fingers can near ergonomics which means watching people as they use tools and understanding their brain state as a way

of re-engineering and redesigning for example interface and neuromodulation which is the act of projecting into the brain in order to change your state in much the same way you do with caffeine does anyone here use caffeine then you're very very uncomfortable with neuromodulation it's just that a Red Bull is much slower than electric current and it would be nice to be able to have that jolt in the moment and other things like that Joel I'd like to just point out today that if you're interested in talking to us our email which will show up at the end again as lab X at UCF dot edu so with the doubt of that amount of further ado Matt tell

them a little bit about what we're doing all right so I would like to point out that we actually submitted this paper several months before Elon Musk made his neural link announcement however the timing of that was very good for us and so Ilana if you happen to be watching this please send us a message we'd love to chat with you but the reason I I want to bring this up is that I think that it shows how quickly we are moving towards consumer devices in that announcement mr. musk mentioned that they want to begin human trials within one year so 2020 is the target date to begin human trials and they want a consumer device

within ten years so we'll see what that happens but we have some very large companies such as neural link Facebook and others that are actively working to try to bring this onto the market so just a quick overview on how the nervous system works at the very base level we have neurons which are cells that communicate with one another and the way that they communicate is that they get these upstream signals sorry let me use the they get upstream signals from dendrites which are connected to other neurons that are sending these signals to the neuron and after a certain threshold is met or exceeded then the cell body which is the soma or the nucleus of that

neuron will then decide to fire and when it fires it sends an electrical impulse down this thing called the axon which sends its electrical impulse down that axon to the synapse and that releases neurotransmitters across what are called the synaptic gap downstream from the synaptic gap is another dendrite which is connected to another neuron and so on and so forth and so that's how these messages get passed the importance of this is something called the action action potential which is what happens when this electrical current travels down that axon and the reason that that's important is that's something that we can detect and we're going to talk about that more in just a minute just a very quick high-level overview of

some of the anatomy of the brain you can see different components here but the the three that I really want to focus on are the cortex which I'll talk more about in a second but the amygdala which is this sort of almond shaped orange reddish sort of thing here in the middle the amygdala is responsible for emotional processing or making sort of these emotional or affective associations to stimulate and the reason that this is important to what we're talking about today is that these associations can happen at a non non conscious or an unconscious level and this is actually what protects us a lot from danger it this may play a very significant role in things like PTSD so

there was a case study of someone who witnessed the 9/11 attacks and didn't really have any symptoms or anything but then a full year went by since those attacks and suddenly just completely literally out of the blue was a clear blue day fall and the air was very cool and crisp in a very similar way to the day that that 9/11 attack happened and all of a sudden this this gentleman just was over overwhelmed with a panic attack it didn't really understand why and one of the main reasons that may have been occurring was that the amygdala had made this association between those weather conditions in danger but he himself had no idea that his brain had made this

association so this demonstrates how the brain can make associations between things that we have absolutely no conscious idea or understanding that it's making in contrast to that we have the hippocampus which is this thing right behind the amygdala and that's responsible for the consolidation of memory and so this is what transfers basically short-term memory into long-term memory this happens a lot during sleep and so you can actually suffer from something called sleep induced amnesia where if you stay up for a several period or excuse me several days in a row you will actually lose very significant chunks of time and one of the reasons for that is that your hippocampus is not consolidating those memories also in brain trauma we see

sometimes when people receive receive brain traumas so they'll get a concussion or something like that if there's damage to that hippocampus there's a very low probability that that that person will have any sort of memory for that event instead they'll just have this chunk of time that's lost where they were doing something and then the next thing they knew they woke up somewhere like in a hospital okay so then coming back to the cortex when we look at the cortex this crinkly sort of outer sheath of the brain that we typically think of when we think about the brain the cortex is divided roughly into four regions and in this case this pink area on the left hand

side would be the front and that is the frontal lobe and right behind that we've got the parietal lobe which kind of sits up on top and then the temporal lobe which is kind of right by the ear and then the occipital lobe the the frontal lobe is responsible for what we call executive functions and these are things like attention working memory decision-making reasoning and coincidentally when someone's very upset it tends to drive the attentional focus towards whatever's upsetting us but that also distracts us from things like being able to reason clearly so if somebody's very emotionally upset their chances of them being able to reason through something very very well is probably not so good

likewise motor fine motor control I should specify it's not just motor control but it's fine motor control is controlled by the prefrontal premotor cortex which is just kind of in the back end of this frontal lobe here if you talk to any veterans one of the first things that goes out the window in combat when things are really intense is this ability to do fine motor functions your gross motor skills will still be there but your fine motor skills aren't so good and that's one of the reasons in the parietal lobe we have somatosensory which is your sense for your body so when you when you experience touching sensations like on your hands or on your

cheek or anywhere on your body there is a corresponding representation of that part of your body in your cement sensory cortex which is right here in the front of the parietal lobe temporal lobe is also known as auditory con auditory cortex this is what processes auditory information it's also primarily responsible for long-term memory and then finally in the back we have the occipital lobe which is also known as the visual cortex and this is what processes visual information now these don't operate in isolation okay so if you see something it goes that information goes from your eyes over here back through the optical nerve to the occipital lobe in the visual cortex but then very quickly it moves forward

to these other lobes so if you see a baseball coming at you that information is initially processed in your visual cortex but your temporal lobe starts processing that in in trying to recognize what that object is and recognizes it as a baseball while your parietal lobe is calculating the trajectory of it coming towards you and trying to understand where that baseball is spatially in relation to yourself so you know looking at this York invent one oh sure looking at this and have you ever tried to explain how a modern computer works to someone who's naive it's a strange moment right there's all of these layers and all the miracles happening and you're like no listen to

you no hardware and software and to them it's a screen and it's it's it's a tool I'd like you to take just a second and think about your own brain you don't do that very often how many people here have held the brain in your hands I don't care who it what type of brain it's a fascinating thing right it's a lot slow smaller than the head you know it's a it's padded by a lot of things your own brain is likely like think a large grapefruit now so just think about that for a moment it's sitting there between your ears right now it's the reason that you're looking at me and talking to me that object is in fact an

amalgam of many different pieces and a change to any one of those pieces can have huge effects on what you can do and who you are we've all read stories about that some of us have people in our families who have those issues people who have issues with memory it's very interesting to look at a person and very frightening and see how although the hole is still them pieces can change and in fact if you go forward to slide out of this this is something we write about a lot and and science fiction has been pulling on this thread our whole lives and in fact one of the strange things about what we're going to talk to you

about today is even deep experts in this field have trouble separating the science fiction and the poetry and then the lore that we've been exposed to our whole lives from the reality that is changing every single day so what I'd like you to do for a second is just think about where you get your ideas you know the ghost in the shell' is entirely about hacking brains the kits and Neuromancer books are deep and everybody is understanding in this community of what brains are and how they react with technology and what that means right now I am banks books look to windward are really what musk talks about when he talks about near lengthy the neural lace there is what his his

link to this world is and so one of the fascinating things that comes out of this is is it gets a little hard to separate sometimes the narrative because the scientists are using the science fiction to inform the reality so think about that as we talk about what's actually possible right now because what we're going to do now is get away from how this lump of jelly between your ears if you've ever dissected a brain it's like dissecting a cup of yogurt it just reveals nothing but how we can get into it and start to understand what's coming out of it and then how we can manipulate that so talk a little bit about sort of

that well chew in pieces here and so if we're reading from the brain there's really two types of signal that we can detect one is blood flow and so the neurons I talked about earlier they're just like muscle cells really you know when when they're working they're consuming oxygen right so they need that that replenishment of oxygenated hemoglobin and so what we can do is we can actually detect when that starts to differentiate and where in the brain that differentiation is happening and so that creates something called a bold signal that we can then detect and you can see examples of that on the left likewise when those neurons are firing they're producing these electrical

currents and that's also detectable by an EEG like what I'm wearing right now so uh consider how you would determine what a computer is doing by watching its thermal signatures or by watching how much energy it uses in any given place you might not be able to tell much but you might be able to tell that when it's doing visually complex geometry certain parts heat up and those are related to that it's an association game when you start using this in fact what you're looking at here on the bottom it's a great study on the left are people being tickled and laughing and in the center are people being tickled and trying to inhibit their laughter stop and on the

right are people voluntarily laughing had funny images and you can immediately look at the areas where the most blood is used and start to draw associations right and say oh well the difference between tickling and laughter and tickling and inhibition might be the things you use to inhibit things right so this is the sort of thing that scientists use to tease this apart electrical signals are a little different in a great metaphor that's used in neurosciences imagine sitting on the outside of the Astrodome with a stethoscope listening to a game what could you tell you're probably telling the team's score right you could tell maybe if the audience is seated in in teams who scored right by

who cheers there would be moments that you heard over and over again we all know the sound of a soccer score right you can hear it in your head right now it's your brain so the these electrical system the signals are also quite useful and in fact we are teasing them apart right now in ways that would have been science fiction only five years ago ten years ago and in fact it's interesting to note if you look at mindflex there in the middle mindflex is a game that's been in production for almost a decade that lets you levitate balls using your mind using EEG it's a very very simple implementation of EEG what is possible

now is an order of magnitude more nuanced and that has a lot of interesting implications I should also note that you these things are used in combination we'll talk more about that in just a moment so it's not all about output we can input to the brain as well I mean I'm doing it right now I'm inputting to all your brains it's not it's it's you know it's fairly simple but what we can do is actually project force directly into the brain so transcranial magnetic stimulation has been around now for some 60 years 80 depending on how you talk about it and it is the use of magnetic fields very focused magnetic fields to change how neurons fire and very good at

doing things like increasing excitement or decreasing that excitement in parts of the brain trans-canada cranial direct current stimulation is one of my favorites there's a homebrew community of people attaching sponges to their heads and running current through are there any of you here awesome hey I have to build one too these are people actively running current through their heads and their technology is a direct descendant of electroshock therapy that you've seen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest refined by decades and decades and decades and something that is enjoying a kind of a renaissance what you're seeing on the bottom there is a very high density array that can stimulate areas of the brain with more resolution than we have

ever been able to before deep brain stimulation is a fascinating thing in which you stimulate from the inside of the brain out it has been used to treat a number of neurological diseases but interestingly recently you'll find it being piloted for things like losing weight it's a brave new world you know finally these sensory and prosthetic implants that give input to the brain are a really interesting thing who here has a friend or a relative of the cochlear implant so these are fascinating things and they're usually implanted as young as you and and the reason is the younger you get this into someone's head the better their brain adapts to it and the better they'll be able to hear so these really

are implants for children as the picture shows there is a similar implant which is becoming more and more common which does the same thing with the retina it's very much the same idea Tepes feeds information directly into your optic nerves last but not least in this memory piece by Lawrence Livermore labs which they showed off in 2014 tickles your hippocampus when you should be memory remembering things and boosts your ability to do so significantly so it's not just about sensory we're looking at futures where you might be able to change many functions of the brain aughh meant and and we should talk a little bit later disrupt so input/output but the really interesting thing that's

happening right now if you go to the next slide is input/output systems because we're at the point where input and output are good enough that we can start building systems that do it in a cycle and this is what lab X does and this is what I'm most excited about these are fascinating technologies look any one of them up for hours of weird reading transcranial Doppler is Doppler radar refined to reach in and measure blood flow in exact locations in the brain and also capable of stimulation optogenetics changed the genetic code of cells to make them emit light or receive light to make them fire or when they fire and as a result you can create a

light interface to the brain not to my knowledge being done with humans absolutely being done with mice these ACOG dicen systems are fascinating and these are what neural ink is promising Sonoran lynx technology is joined by another group called core tech who are laying electrodes across the surface of the brain and stimulating regions that they touch another very interesting group at Brown is sprinkling what it calls grains across the surface of the brain each one of which can be reached via a specific electromagnetic and reflected back so these actually sit as tiny little pieces in your brain and can be written to and read from a very interesting future there and then we've got the unknowns top right you're

looking at a rather cryptic picture the deep water put out deep water grows out of Facebook they are focusing light inside the body and they're doing that to create high resolution imaging and do things like take your MRI out of the hospital and put it in an ambulance but they're also creating brain computer interface which may or may not read them right I believe the general consensus of my communities it does both but nobody knows Facebook just published in Nature a week and a half ago when individuals are answering questions Facebook can pull that out of their heads with an accuracy of about 70% that's without using the audio they're pulling that directly out of their heads this joins a

lot of very similar very invasive findings I should you should say and and so I want you to just consider this chunk of jelly between your ears for a second more it's been yours your whole life really whatever you're thinking right now it's yours and that's this is near the last moment that that would be true going forward for some people it's already not true and the opportunities are amazing and the possibilities for abuse are equally amazing and that is why we are here to talk to you today so I just want to take a moment and then pull you into the present this is Jeong at all from 2018 you're looking at two individuals who are both

looking at a Tetris screen you see them top and bottom the sender's send a one and send or two did you manage to find a brand yet we did not did you bring us to this this was a request that I made I said I would like a brain and also I would like a pony tragically the human brain was a little hard to bring with us in turn you are my hair hello fella I grew up with horses this makes me very happy here we will name one of them terribly thank you that perfect so wonderful you've got two people watching tetris like just watching the shapes fall we've all done this you ever

watched your friend play tetris monitoring they're watching tetris that information is pulled out of their brain through a brain computer interface and move to another computer where it is set up with a receiver who's in a bi-directional link and that person can't see the tetris screen but they can play it because they're receiving the information from the two centers I just want you to think about that for a second this is where we are right now and by the way because of academic research this was done in 2016 we're in way more interesting places right now but your understanding of where this technology is like like most people is probably a little out of date like a lot

of things it's moving very quickly right and so things that were science fiction are quite suddenly reality so what we're going to do real quickly is set up Matt on a live connection so give me just a moment here

I see so Matt is wearing an EEG headset and what we're going to do is give you all an opportunity to watch what's going on in his head live right now this is actually how easy it is to connect this thing would have been a miracle 20 years ago I'm delighted that I'm doing research in a time when this isn't the size of a refrigerator what you are looking at is raw output from three electrodes on his head you're listening to the electrical signals essentially from his brain and these are the types of signals that could be used to understand a variety of interesting things and to talk to you about what that means I'd like to show

you some examples of brainwave activity so you can start to understand how somebody might use this as an X play so here we are looking at Matt's electrical neural activity and to be clearer here what we're looking at in the top is this ongoing pattern that you see here and this pattern is the sum of all of these neurons firing over time and in fact you can see that you can see patterns in it so if you look up at the top here's what somebody who is excited or relaxed drowsy asleep deep sleep coma looks like Matt's a little closer to the excited side of the spectrum right now the interesting thing is like in the

signal you can clip little pieces of it out remember the soccer goals there are moments that mean things and we're learning them that there are vocabulary of the brain in the way that there's a vocabulary of a soccer game right and so those moments those ERPs can be pulled out and they can be used for things so remember we talked about informing AI by listening to the brain if you make an error I can pull that out of your head by listening to this signal maybe as much as a second faster than it would take you to say step on the brake with your foot or press a button with your finger that's a lot of time in some

contexts I think you'll agree so there's this running joke of why is there not an undo button on an unexciting press the button you're dead but if you could move that in 50 milliseconds maybe you wouldn't be dead the interesting thing about pulling out these air peas and using them in systems is you can imagine that the machine learning the the analysis there used to pull these out they're also indicative of the ability to play them back to modify and also if you start thinking about it in a penetration standpoint they look a whole lot like a lot of situations where you might interact with a certain denial of service is a possibility right spoofing absolute

possibility could you get the machine to think the human had done something they had not unquestionably could you get the machine to not know that the human had done something I had absolutely and so this is where we get into an interesting set of questions that are really the heart of our talk thank you for being patient just we give you the pieces to get here the world is becoming a very interesting place but the same skills that all of you employ every day can be used to to change it come on I'm gonna pull us down a slide here so what I'd like you to consider for a second is just a few ideas

when you connect machines to the brain encryption is rare why well first latency is really undesirable right how many people would like an artificial limb that works on has 1 second delay then this just sounds like the worst and by the way many of them work on the delay if it's we're working on that power is precious every second that your extension of ability continues is precious to you how do you feel when you lose your smartphone when that's taken away from you people don't want to give up power to things like encryption also implanted systems are long lifespan I think everybody talks about long lifespan systems but by definition something that's put under your skin is

supposed to exist for your whole life you don't want to cut it out again and as a result these systems are very open very unrestricted and the medical community rationally keeps them that way although maybe they won't for long epochs really restrict scientific research I have to work very hard with panels to or do human subjects research but hackers won't not some of them for the same reasons that it's hard to do phishing research because it's hard to ethically send a million emails before you have your morning coffee but spammers can do a/b testing and in giant numbers for the same reasons we're going to learn some things for the people who promote these systems and large numbers

well so the brain has a lot of side channels if you've got an insulin pump I can stop your brain right so so when you talk about side channel attacks realize that your entire body or entire peripheral nervous system is a side channel to your brain so really I'd like you to consider the fact that humans have become cyber-physical systems and we need to start treating them as such this is let me just skip ahead for just a second so what we're seeing is really a migration from traditional cyber where this thing this information is in the cloud to the interface to the brain itself and we'll come back to this but I just wanted to show this for a second

while we discuss different possibilities for attack here now on the more traditional side and let me say real quick also that one of the goals that Ben and myself have is to develop some sort of security framework for neural security and I realized that the three pillars of information security are not perfect they they have their flaws they're limited so on and so forth but as a place to just describe kind of the beginnings of this and to have this initial conversation we've got confidentiality integrity and availability confidentiality being the protection of protected information or private information integrity being the protection of that information from being modified without authorized consent and availability having access to that information so if we look at

from the transmission of of this information say from one brain to another one brain to the cloud or some sort of system like that what have we seen so far well transmission interception of the transmissions well this has been done there's been a group that has already looked at unencrypted signals and have been able to reverse-engineer that to the point of even reversing pin numbers I don't believe that they've done passwords yet but that's that's kind of the next stage altering the integrity of that information so in this particular case the researchers were looking at a brain-controlled remote remote control car and this car would left if you thought you know left and turned right if you thought right and

they reversed that so it would do the opposite of what you were thinking it been mentioned earlier the control the neural control of a prosthetic device we you can imagine very quickly that if you did something very similar to that attack to the remote control car but to your prosthetic arm it could have very detrimental effects and then availability simple denial of service that's something that is very easy to do at this point from the technology perspective however when we move downstream a little bit we start talking about the actual interface between the Machine and the brain now it starts to become interesting so again reversing pens the reversing of the pen was happening purely from that ERP signal

the researchers were just showing numbers to the subjects and as the the pen was being revealed they would show an amplified p300 wave and from that they could decipher what their pins their security pins were direct neural stimulation I mentioned the mapping of the cortex well the way that that functional specialization was discovered in the first place was in the 1950s neuro scientists and neuro surgeons at Walter Reed Medical Center were actually doing open brain surgery without the skull and in the process of doing this they would stimulate different parts of the brain and as they would do this people would spontaneously start laughing they might experience smells or tastes a few reported hearing voices or

music and this is all that's happening here is that somebody is placing an electrical probe into the cortex a certain part of cortex and then stimulating that so you can imagine that if that's possible if somebody has an embedded device and someone is able to access that device in an unauthorized way well then you've got a really interesting attack their consciousness attacks apparently there's actually a consciousness switch in the brain that can be tripped through stimulation and this would be an example of denial service obviously and again through the same technology as what we saw from the Walter Reed studies ok so that stuff's interesting but let's get into the really weird stuff right so let's see

where we can really take this so confidentiality direct neural stimulation we talked about reading from the brain alright so reading blood flow reading electrical activity the question is is how far away can this happen you know how far away can you project an infrared laser and actually read the activity that's happening in someone's brain that's that's an open question right now how far away can you read electrical activity it's possible to read an EKG signal from 200 meters away from one person so how far away are we from that being applied to the brain and being able to receive signals that we can then decipher operant conditioning so BF Skinner developed operant conditioning in the early part of the 20th century

from probably about the 1920s till about the 1950s in psychology this is one of the strongest theoretical principles in all of psychology operant conditioning works BF Skinner trained rats to do a whole host of activities by giving them positive rewards or by giving him Punishers and by altering the sequence of these in the learning cycle that he was able to teach them how to do very very intricate tasks and afterwards he applied the same principles to his children and well apparently they worked there too they have turned out fine know nothing to see here he wrote a book about it - yeah if you've ever seen the movie Clockwork Orange this is the principles that they were using there

too reform the criminal okay so let's take that one step further right we already talked about how we can stimulate parts of the brain so what if we could stimulate pleasure centers what if we could stimulate pain and what if we couple this with something like geofencing what if we don't want you going to work so we give you a dose of pain every time you enter a geo-fenced area or what if we just make you feel nauseous if you if you kind of let your imagination kind of run wild with this for a second you can really see how you could actually very intricately shape someone's behavior this is old technology but in 2009 the army

developed remote control bee beetle flying beetle and this had a chip and it was a very similar sort of system where different parts were stimulated and they would fly in different directions depending on where the operators wanted that beetle to go in principle there's no reason that we know of that this couldn't also be applied to human beings and then finally we want to talk about directed energy so things that are in existence right now is anyone heard of the mosquito okay a few this is a very interesting device so this it emits sound but it's sound at a frequency that you cannot hear any longer after you are about the age of about 25 years old so

if we want to do a denial of service attack against teenagers because we own a convenience store and we don't want them hanging out after 10 a.m. out or 10 p.m. outside the door well we can turn on this emitter that projects this sound that they cannot stand because it sounds like this very high-pitched whiny mosquito in their ears but if you're over the age of 25 you don't even know that it's happening somebody else use the same technology but uses it as a auditory alert on the text message apps so now the adults can't hear when the kids are getting a text message in 2009 there was an epilepsy website that was hacked and in this case the actors

actually caused the website to project a light of a certain intensity at a certain frequency as to induce seizures and these are in people who are going to the site for help and we're gonna talk about Cuba a little bit more in just a second yeah but that's another interesting case study so when you talk about the neuro security spectrum and we really think there is a spectrum here you're really moving from the traditional to the exotic and I'd like to talk about the traditional but we're all very comfortable with the start information infrastructure attacks work beautifully here right if you have an individual who has a capability through an implant or through a even a system in

its exterior taking that capability from them gives you great control especially if it's an insulin Pole I want to be clear so these traditional types of attacks are absolutely capable of affecting the brain in a side channel or you can direct in some cases situations way BCI brain computer interface brain machine interface attacks take this another step and I want to be clear about what that means when a system touches your peripheral nervous system or your central nervous system or touches some part of your body that through that gives you access to those systems getting more and more sort of side channel and don't know if I like that term but it's the nicest term we

could find for these ideas it gives you the ability to project force and it may also give you the ability to read so you know you make think as you looked over the the attacks that Matt was talking about but I've never heard of anything like this the reason you haven't is that the ethics of testing these types of things are really very complicated and and specifically even the mosquito so here's a seemingly innocuous situation is working its way through the courts because things that put it in public parks where it does exactly what they intended to but I think it is anyone in here under the age of twenty five oh they have to be careful what I say I

joke hey Joe but I think you will all agree that this has some really strange ethical implications you are adults you are participating in the same society that we are isn't a little strange that we could hang something up that makes you uncomfortable in an area that seems like potentially a naval technology from a certain point of view and there are other people in this room who've made a note to purchase it so the point I'm making here is that the these BCI BMI attacks get really very complicated very quickly in terms of ethics but if you're not using ethics you'll be able to test a lot of things quickly and I think that's what we're going to see in fact

it's what we're going to ask you to do as thought experiments please in a few minutes here neural attacks get even a little stranger in the same way I saw a talk on satellites today that you can use direct projection of force dues they call it direct energy weapons on a satellite that's very much a cyber attack if you're hitting a satellite with microwaves and cooking its processor through or just disrupting them for a period of time neural attacks run the gambit from using channels like BCM BMI to long range or even short range neuroimaging attacks to the fact that you might really be able to project force directly into people's heads and the type of understanding that the

scientific community is building right now can absolutely be used to accomplish these sorts of things and so when we look at the traditional to the exotic I think we can also understand that the exotic is actually a fairly near future and may actually indeed be a present so with that I think Matt let's talk about attack surfaces and vectors and space in at first a very traditional sense something that's been around for years there are over two million people who have cochlear implants right now within United States alone and more and more as Thais as it goes along it's a very well understood type of implant so in a traditional cyber sense the interesting thing is that these are now

cell phone connected iOS is the largest server of implants for data anywhere and what you can do is you can listen to podcasts you can answer your phone through your implant anything you could do through a Bluetooth headset so there's a lot of very traditional attacks I mean you could just take away a person's ability to have that service and then harm their life taking another step if you step away from the phone suddenly you're in a small proprietary cyber-physical system standard things in weird little cyber physical systems apply you might not be on IP you might find some weird other protocol these things have been constructed since the 80s but it looks very similar to cyber

physical systems until you start tickling the aural nerve and I have to say this is not this is peripheral nervous system it's a sensory nervous system but certainly playing loud repetitive noises to people is a technique that has been used in interrogation and torture for some time now and it's now directly available to you through being able to reach out and and through the fact that it only takes a tiny amount of electrical current relative to modern electronics to project a lot of force into the brain right so let's take another step though just with a cochlear implant could we do the thing we were talking about earlier will you condition people what if every

time you stepped into an area there was a sound that was truly unpleasant in your ears you'd stop stepping into that area so with that I'd like to take another step and have Matt tell you about a real exotic so I mentioned Cuba earlier and some of you may have heard of this some of you may not but between 2016 and 2018 there were multiple employees at the u.s. embassy and I believe also at the Canadian Embassy in Cuba who experienced very sudden set of this very loud high-pitched like a chirping or a screeching sort of noise and very shortly after experience dizziness trouble seeing sometimes pain and also sometimes the the ability to function with their motor functions and

this has been fairly controversial because at first the people weren't believed but they all have very similar accounts of what had happened they had either walked into a particular part of the embassy and then just like somebody flipping a switch all of a sudden this this thing happened to them and a few reported collapsing others reported being in a place and then all of a sudden something just came on and they heard this screeching noise so as I mentioned there's been a lot of skepticism about this so just two weeks ago well yeah it was the July issue of JAMA the Journal of American Medical Association released a study that was conducted by the University of

Pennsylvania where they actually did MRIs on these people that were reporting this and they compared them to two control groups one was a sort of normal statistically normal sample population sample the other control group was traumatic brain injury TBI patients and what they found was two things that were very interesting one was that these employees who were reporting this reported severe or excuse me their MRIs revealed a severe degradation and reduction of white matter in their brain and this was generally but it was also in certain cases localized and remember I mentioned that these people reported trouble hearing and trouble seeing well two of the localized areas were an auditory and visual cortex and in those

localized areas they showed reduction in white matter and in gray matter white matter you can probably speak to it in a second but it's it's not very well understood in terms of what its function is but essentially what it does is it helps to relay communications between different parts of the brain basically and it's made up of primarily myelin which acts as an insulator for those neurons that are passing on messages very very badly not good if it's degraded so I think the the interesting thing here is that this in my mind doesn't sound like a sonic weapon it sounds like something that as a side effect is causing the sound and in fact this guy Seth Horowitz neuroscientist at

Brown had very similar thoughts on this it's an interesting moment we're gonna keep watching it but I think in light of what we talked about you can see that the this exotic future may be closer than we imagined on that note really if you think attack attention or a detection defense there's really interesting set of questions here how and what do we do so how do you detect these things baselining is something that at a certain point in history was done very infrequently on computer systems now anyone who cares about their computer systems build a baseline and understands the difference let's also by the way done by football teams to understand concussion damage maybe we need to start doing it on all

of us to understand what we used to be like says the US the State Department would like you to move to a location where the sound is not present in the grand tradition of get under your desks and cover your head prestigious cyber-physical systems I mean there's a readi malware scans maybe we can build more hardened systems but boy they sure cost power and latency what are we doing here we don't know open question conditioning boy you know how do you give a cognitive baseline to somebody who might not be willing to give you one right conditioning can do really whole things to people for a little bit of history of that look at the entire

history of war criminals so this is a really interesting set of questions and really we'd like you guys to give us some thoughts and talk to us that at Nora secure on Twitter or if you prefer there's other ways to reach out what you're watching here is a rat that has a single wire connected to the pleasure center of its brain and it's pressing a pedal that gives it a very small pump of current and every time it does it's experiences pleasure pure pleasure it doesn't want cocaine if you give it to it it's that good doesn't have sex it usually in this case will die of dehydration because the pedal is better than taking a drink it's fascinating

just take a moment and think about this lump of jelly between your ears and and how much it's you but also how much it is a set of triggers for you you know you say pressing my buttons you really do have buttons and so we exist in a moment we're starting to learn how to really fundamentally press the buttons in ways that have never been available before or that haven't been available for 80 years but have never been given to the masses so with that I'd like to open it up to you what do you think is important to look at here how do we handle this going forward the security community actually is the community to

look at this this is a cyber physical system that issue and I know cyber frickles physical systems are always the worst to complicated they're weird the real world is all around them so now you're one you have an implicit need to deal with this and we would like you to talk to us and I'm not just talking to you I'm talking to you talk to us about where you think this needs to go because we are studying this as we build it and so in that sense I think it's important that we involve this community the laboratory for autonomy brain exchange is at lab X a UCF D to you if you'd like to reach out not on Twitter tweet us at

ed neuro secure and for right now let me open to the room what do you see that we don't thank you for your attention um you mentioned ethics earlier on but how can you actually test this on humans without I mean you can you could also be seeing happening more repressive regimes but how can you actually do this in the u.s. do people have to volunteer undergraduates I mean you can't is the answer although I think it's going to get more complicated if you start seeing these things in the wild right so you can't create a true experiment and you can look at a situation like concussions what concussions are having a moment right traumatic brain injury is having a

moment both because of war and football and and other things so here's a good example of how you do this when you have enough in the wild suddenly you have a sample grimly enough but I think you'll agree that there might be better ways to do this than to wait until there's a sample in the wild on the other hand this is the endless difficult part of this type of research there is no ethical way to study some things and there's a long history of grappling with that and so what we do is in our laboratories we look at the underpinnings in ways that are very ethical and work very hard to make sure that every undergrad is safe and and has

no ill effects and indeed is just building knowledge for everyone the interesting thing is that the future is is we believe going to include things that we can't study and I I don't have a good answer so you showed the variable reward schedule video with the rat pressing the lever so game designers have been doing this for a while I mean you could argue that candy crush and Angry Birds and those kinds of games are experiments in variable reward schedules to see things going back much further sure sure human companionship social media so so the that leads me to my question how do we defend against in the one in the one case I mean do we wear tin foil hats or

or you know some sort of cloaking device or there's something that'll you know cover our heads to protect us from Cuba style sonic or whatever weaponry and and you know what can be we do there all the way through to how can we defend against viral ideas like white supremacy or something like that that will cause people to snap and do things that we you know that are not hungry they're not too often yeah yeah I mean I would have told you tinfoil hats were a bad idea a decade ago but actually just a quick tin foil actually amplifies the signal so don't go with the tin foil it's true no tin foil in terms of what to do about it

I think we have a large problem with that right now I mean it's all over and the interesting question is what do we do about technologies that people want but aren't good for them and there's a long history of that question humans have had technologies that they want but aren't good for them since time immemorial I do think however in this case they've never come in such fast waves so you know we all have hesitations about Facebook if you don't have hesitations about Facebook you should if you we all have hesitations about social media and bubbles they feel good but are they good for us probably not one of the interesting things that I think the research side can look at is

understanding how people condition themselves but I think the other thing is about speed you know conditioning yourself to Facebook or to your smartphone takes some time now these rats condition in a matter of minutes so that's I think you'll agree a pretty exciting difference so the the technology which is not a good nor evil it's just extending our reach and I think it's important to think about where our reach is now and where it's going that's not a solution but it is part of the dialogue that we want to have with the security community that's one you're already having that's one of the wonderful things and I mean the thing to understand about this is

that that rat the rat's brain that is the rats brains reward system that is being used right so when your child does something good and you get that positive feeling from that that's exactly the same thing that's happening it's just in one case it's happening from an electrical current and the other case it's happening as a result of some action in the world in terms of defending against it how do you yeah yeah that's why we want to have this conversation now yeah maybe by stopping it from happening in the first half all right science fiction from the 70s has ready explore at this point the guy who did is named Larry Niven his suggestion was

that people who would indulge in these types of technologies generally died in the cells of dehydration early after themselves out of the genetic pool I don't like that future but Larry did he's funny alright I I'm sorry to cut this all off but unfortunately we're out of time thank you so much for speaking thanks so much everybody for coming thank you if you'd like to come up and talk we'll be here for thank you