Flutterby™! : Scanning with WiFi

Scanning with WiFi

2016-08-25 16:50:27.860546+00 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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#Comment Re: Scanning with WiFi made: 2016-08-26 12:57:03.525971+00 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 16:13:23.283658+00 by: Dan Lyke

No, it doesn't. It's just measuring interference.

#Comment Re: Scanning with WiFi made: 2016-08-26 16:15:48.930838+00 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.

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