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You and your neighbors could have radio-wave vision (gizmodo.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The technology to convert wifi signals into the placement and identity of people is getting much better. Not by using their devices, just the waves bouncing of their bodies. (There's nothing new to the pipeline as far as I can tell, we're just starting to get into the accuracy ranges that make it easy/useful.)

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[โ€“] 4 points 5 months ago (11 children)

there's gotta be some way to jam the frequencies or introduce some kind of interference with other waves... right?

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  • [โ€“] 6 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    I mean it sounds pretty rough... and it would seem to me the real problem is they are making it sound like the problem is the existing routers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it basically saying... someone could drop in a battery powered wifi router in your front yard and spy through your walls?

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  • [โ€“] 9 points 5 months ago

    To an extent. it's better to have it inside with you and lots of other devices around to get a good picture from the BFI.

    AS bad as it sounds, you'r probably sitting next to, or carrying with you a cellphone with a unique IMEI that ties you to credit cards and social security numbers, it has an exact GPS lock available to police for the asking, and even if you turn that off, a yagi or any antenna locator could id you far better than the BFI.

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  • [โ€“] 6 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    They could do the same thing with a speaker playing a sound. It's basically sonar, but the waves being measured are RF and not sound. But it being outside your home wouldn't work that well; wifi does not penetrate wood or plaster walls very well, and won't get through brick or metal at all. They can shape it, to go around things, but unless it's extremely high powered, it won't go through anything solid.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 5 months ago* (3 children)

    It's a (corrupted) router level attack, so the sensible counter is OpenWRT or rolling your own router. I doubt many cheap routers have the grunt to run this anyway.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    The attacker has to be broadcasting to make the attack work. Running OpenWRT and keeping it up to date probably protects you from someone using your own router against you better than stock firmware.

    But another expected scenario is an attacker with a nondescript car and a wifi router inside who can sweep the neighborhood searching thru walls for Person X.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    But another expected scenario is an attacker with a nondescript car and a wifi router inside who can sweep the neighborhood searching thru walls for Person X.

    Hmmf, nasty, but labor intensive. Is it working on backscatter ? because your devices shouldn't be responding much (beyond ping / authentication query level).

    Also, at that point they can just use whatever fits in a van, radar, IR scanners, who knows what, fucking X-rays maybe, don't know that they'd bother with this.

    Avoiding it being deployed at scale to everybody's router might be more important.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 5 months ago

    Oh, for most usecases I can think of, there are easier ways. For example, by attacking the cellphone the person is carrying. Or watching for their gait on network cams instead of via wifi.

    No phone? Hiding inside? It's a terrrist, prol;ly

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