The craziest thing about this is that it’s effectively an attack vector for any adversary to be active within that time window given it can measure eye movements or predict it. I’ve come across some material that shows some ML/NN stuff was trained on it to validate if it could pass human perception (yes, easily).
There's a pretty common street fighting move of stomping with the forward foot while you throw a punch. An untrained opponent will glance down and you pop them during the saccade. It's even explicitly part of the "proper" technique in some martial arts that allow both hand and foot strikes.
After it gets you a few times you just learn not to look but there's no general defense against the idea I don't think, just specific applications of it.
I'm admittedly having a hard time figuring out practical attacks that could make use of this.
Screen content manipulation (eg a desktop)? Exceedingly unlikely to be the simplest strategy. Real-world manipulation? Not sure what could be achieved.
Hmm, information suggestion (displaying an onscreen message just outside the field of view, and changing it to something else when the user looks at that area of the screen) comes to mind, but that's not really up there either.
I’m picturing an automated turret of some kind with the ability to track saccades and aim and track their human target during those periods. Turret is placed in the corner of a room, for example, engineered in a non-obvious shape. The target it’s tracking can move around briefly as the turret continues to track the target and in the meantime it can analyze the situation, maybe even phone home for authorization to fire. The human target would have no idea it’s being aimed at, right?
Could be useful for something like hostage rescue, maybe?
My problem with this is that once we have machines capable of tracking and exploiting saccades, humans have already lost completely and there’s no need for that kind of ability. I feel like our brains are too slow to compete with silicon.
Not all people driving cars look left and right thoroughly before turning (but you can learn! [0]) This already leads to crashes and claims of 'coming out of nowhere'. So, practical attacks could be causing crashes. Could cause anxiety, injury, death, monetary loss, etc
Imagine perhaps exfiltration for any information within a saccade window. That wasn’t lag or a flicker of the imagination. Ghost in the shell relaying exfiltration semaphores.
It’s not just the amazing ways it exploits physical camouflage scenarios but also digital camouflage. It’s the perfect pair to steganography.
