Welcome To Subconscious Encryption
In this month’s Nautilus story, “Safecracking the Brain,” I dug into the work of two research groups that are stealing tips from cryptology to better understand how our brains work. While reporting that story, I came across a scientist who’s taking the opposite approach: using tricks of the brain to design stronger encryption tools. His name is Hristo Bojinov, and he has figured out a way for the subconscious mind to learn and store long passwords—with the conscious mind none the wiser.
One of the most effective ways to undermine a security system is with a so-called “rubber hose attack,” in which the attacker forces a person who knows the code to reveal it—for example, a thief taking someone at gunpoint to an ATM to withdraw money.
Bojinov, a graduate student in Dan Boneh’s computer science lab at Stanford University, has been working with cognitive psychologists at Northwestern University to prevent rubber hose attacks. Their solution allows you to learn a code not with conscious, explicit memory—which is vulnerable to outside pressures—but rather with implicit memory, which you’re not consciously aware of, and therefore, could never be compelled to divulge.
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