Seeing Without Alarming Thief: Passive WiFi Sensing for Indoor Security Monitoring

WiFi chipset is critical to every smartphone, tablet, laptop, and smart home device. So far, authentication and encryption matters such as WPA2/WPA3 attacks have gotten much attention from the security research community. However, due to the ubiquity of WiFi in our life, the surveillance concerns in WiFi, such as tracking, are substantial. This paper explains how thieves might utilize passive WiFi sensing to conduct surveillance and determine whether the owner of a house is at home (in order to get into the house and take goods). Unlike previous research, we conduct this analysis using the latest commercial WiFi generation, IEEE 802.11ax. The assessment findings demonstrate that our system can reliably detect when a person enters or exits a room, even when the signal receiver is at a sibling room or non-line-of-sight location. This capability indicates that WiFi surveillance/privacy issues are genuine and significant. Additionally, this is beneficial for monitoring activity and supplementing a camera-based system in inaccessible regions.