Encrypt with Your Mind: Reliable and Revocable Brain Biometrics via Multidimensional Gaussian Fitted Bit Allocation

Biometric features, e.g., fingerprints, the iris, and the face, have been widely used to authenticate individuals. However, most biometrics are not cancellable, i.e., once these biometric features are cloned or stolen, they cannot be replaced easily. Unlike traditional biometrics, brain biometrics are extremely difficult to clone or forge due to the natural randomness across different individuals, which makes them an ideal option for identity authentication. Most existing brain biometrics are based on electroencephalogram (EEG), which is usually demonstrated unstable performance due to the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). For the first time, we propose the use of intracortical brain signals, which have higher resolution and SNR, to realize the construction of the high-performance brain biometrics. Specifically, we put forward a novel brain-based key generation approach called multidimensional Gaussian fitted bit allocation (MGFBA). The proposed MGFBA method extracts keys from the local field potential of ten rats with high reliability and high entropy. We found that with the proposed MGFBA, the average effective key length of the brain biometrics was 938 bits, while achieving high authentication accuracy of 88.1% at a false acceptance rate of 1.9%, which is significantly improved compared to conventional EEG-based approaches. In addition, the proposed MGFBA-based keys can be conveniently revoked using different motor behaviors with high entropy. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of using intracortical brain signals for reliable authentication and other security applications.