We analyze the current state of research on EEG-based biometrics, giving an overview of the equipment available, together with practical guidance on the design of EEG-based authentication systems, of the authentication paradigms proposed, and of the empirical evaluations reported in the research literature. We conclude that EEG-based biometrics is still far from becoming a practical proposition. In particular, the time it takes to perform EEG-based user authentication is far above the time for competing biometric authentication schemes, and the number of subjects used in empirical evaluations tends to be too small to generalize results to larger populations.
