Deep learning has been successfully used in numerous applications because of
its outstanding performance and the ability to avoid manual feature
engineering. One such application is electroencephalogram (EEG) based
brain-computer interface (BCI), where multiple convolutional neural network
(CNN) models have been proposed for EEG classification. However, it has been
found that deep learning models can be easily fooled with adversarial examples,
which are normal examples with small deliberate perturbations. This paper
proposes an unsupervised fast gradient sign method (UFGSM) to attack three
popular CNN classifiers in BCIs, and demonstrates its effectiveness. We also
verify the transferability of adversarial examples in BCIs, which means we can
perform attacks even without knowing the architecture and parameters of the
target models, or the datasets they were trained on. To our knowledge, this is
the first study on the vulnerability of CNN classifiers in EEG-based BCIs, and
hopefully will trigger more attention on the security of BCI systems.