Scanning with WiFi
2016-08-25 18:50:27.860546+02 by
Dan Lyke
3 comments
Reading your finger positions to steal your passwords using off-the-shelf WiFi hardware: Keystroke Recognition Using WiFi Signals Kamran Ali, Alex X. Liu, Wei Wang, Muhammad Shahzad
... When a human subject types on
a keyboard, WiKey recognizes the typed keys based on how
the CSI values at the WiFi signal receiver end. We imple-
mented the WiKey system using a TP-Link TL-WR1043ND
WiFi router and a Lenovo X200 laptop. WiKey achieves
more than 97.5% detection rate for detecting the keystroke
and 96.4% recognition accuracy for classifying single keys.
In real-world experiments, WiKey can recognize keystrokes
in a continuously typed sentence with an accuracy of 93.5%.
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comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: Scanning with WiFi made: 2016-08-26 14:57:03.525971+02 by:
battjt
Not enough pictures and to short of an attention span. Is the keyboard connected
to anything, or just interfering with the RF? Does the keyboard need to be
physically attached to one of the radio endpoints to cause the interference?
#Comment Re: Scanning with WiFi made: 2016-08-26 18:13:23.283658+02 by:
Dan Lyke
No, it doesn't. It's just measuring interference.
#Comment Re: Scanning with WiFi made: 2016-08-26 18:15:48.930838+02 by:
Dan Lyke
In this paper, we show for the first time that WiFi signals
can also be exploited to recognize keystrokes. WiFi signals
are pervasive in our daily life at home, offices, and even
shopping centers. The key intuition is that while typing a
certain key, the hands and fingers of a user move in a unique
formation and direction and thus generate a unique pattern
in the time-series of Channel State Information (CSI) values,
which we call CSI-waveform, for that key. The keystrokes
of each key introduce relative unique multi-path distortions
in WiFi signals and this uniqueness can be exploited to recognize
keystrokes. Due to the high data rates supported by
modern WiFi devices, WiFi cards provide enough CSI values
within the duration of a keystroke to construct a high
resolution CSI-waveform for each keystroke.
So it appears that they're not even measuring electrical changes in the keyboard, they're
asserting that off-the-shelf WiFi components have the resolution necessary to detect
interference patterns based on finger position alone.