Multiple convolutional neural network (CNN) classifiers have been proposed
for electroencephalogram (EEG) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However,
CNN models have been found vulnerable to universal adversarial perturbations
(UAPs), which are small and example-independent, yet powerful enough to degrade
the performance of a CNN model, when added to a benign example. This paper
proposes a novel total loss minimization (TLM) approach to generate UAPs for
EEG-based BCIs. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of TLM on
three popular CNN classifiers for both target and non-target attacks. We also
verified the transferability of UAPs in EEG-based BCI systems. To our
knowledge, this is the first study on UAPs of CNN classifiers in EEG-based
BCIs. UAPs are easy to construct, and can attack BCIs in real-time, exposing a
potentially critical security concern of BCIs