I'm surprised that there's not a single comment here about 802.11ay which is also 60GHz. Each channel on that standard can do something like 40Gbps, which is nuts. From Wikipedia[0]:
> The link-rate per stream is 44 Gbit/s, with four streams this goes up to 176 Gbit/s.
Yes, it can't penetrate walls, but is huge for point to point communication. Think VR headset bandwidth, file transfers between devices, wireless backhaul between buildings. It's not just for spying on your cat.
I think it's important to remember that it's not magic, it's just radio waves. You can "sense" with a lot more resolution if you use a camera and light bulb. There are plenty of eyeballs, cameras, and lights all around you right now. Even worse, someone could be looking in your window with binoculars.
> Li-Fi connections are broadcast over the air through a light-emitting diodes (LED) broadcaster and support rates up to 100Gbit/s ... Li-Fi can also serve to identify an object’s indoor position more accurately than Wi-Fi or GPS used today (less than 2cm and less than 3 degrees of orientation while it is providing real-time localization (less than 34ms). This accuracy is vital in multiple applications such as navigation In-Door Robots and Drones, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Gaming, among others ... it cannot go through walls, and thus a private local area network (LAN) can be created by lighting up a closed room ... Any organization that needs to keep information within the four walls, such as military bases and banks, can use the technology to keep data restricted to a single room.
There's potential for visible-light networking but the Li-Fi people in particular are complete garbage. They claim visible light travels faster than radio waves and say Li-Fi is a hundred times faster than wi-fi but their thousand dollar router can only do 100Mb/s. They also rip off the Wi-Fi Alliance logo.
Oh, I have been dreaming about LiFi for some time, if what you're saying it's true, that's... disappointing. Do you have any sources about the current state of (real-world) LiFi ?
Which Li-fi people? AFAICT there are several groups, and li-fi.co (which I'll assume you're talking about) is less advertising for one specific group, and more advocating for the technology as a whole.
> They claim visible light travels faster than radio waves
I wasn't able to find it on the lifi website but seems like some poor copywriter got something wrong
> their thousand dollar router can only do 100Mb/s
Who's they? In any case, since lifi.co is advocating Li-Fi as a whole so it makes sense they talk about theoretical speeds, whereas a specific router from some manufacturer might not be able to reach those speeds, considering how new the technology is
In the end, I imagine Li-Fi doesn't have much of a future outside of niche markets because it has to compete with wifi which is everywhere (and it can't supplant wifi because e.g. it doesn't work in your pocket)
Another big advantage of LiFi is that the usage of light allows LiFi connections to occur almost instantaneously because light travels at extremely fast speeds. This results in faster transmission of data and faster internet connections – about 100 times faster than speeds achievable by WiFi.
With cameras and motion sensors you more or less know how they'll be used and as a user you can choose to disable them (or at the very least block them if you can't disable them).
With this technology, it will be integrated into your router (and clients?), so turning those off will mean to turn off WiFi altogether. Added to that, I'll bet that most people wouldn't even begin to imagine that WiFi could be used for sensing people, and they'll continue using WiFi without being aware for the grave privacy implications.
> With this technology, it will be integrated into your router (and clients?), so turning those off will mean to turn off WiFi altogether.
It's rather unreasonable to think that you won't be able to turn off band on router. Especially given fact that 60Ghz is heavily shielded by _doors_, so any usable router would require fallback 2.4/5/6 Ghz connectivity.
802.11bf Wi-Fi 7 Sensing works with all frequencies, 2.4 and up.
Even if Neighbor 2 turns off their router, Neighbor 1 could passively use the radio waves from Neighbor 3's router to surveil reflections from Neighbor 2, including keyboard typing, heartrate/breathing, location and physical activity.
The problem with this neighbor-spying fear is that "complex math using data from radio waves to sense stuff" is already possible and readily available by anyone willing to study and put in the world of building it, wifi 7 isn't suddenly enabling that part of rf analysis or mathematics.
yes, but the real threat with this is not that it makes something possible that is already possible, but it makes the barrier to use that tech a LOT lower.
Wrapping my house in tin foil is sounding a lot less conspiracy theorist now! Actually my house is going to be stuccoed - I wonder if they are using a metal mesh that I can ground. Hmm...
This is hyperbole. 60GHz cannot penetrate walls and closed doors. 2.4GHz and 5GHz lack the resolution to image you, especially if your adversary only has control of one AP. There are already tons of side channel attacks with existing WiFi and Bluetooth that reveal when someone is in the area. Your neighbour could already be tracking your devices, for all you know.
Thank you!
Also, I can lid the device in a drawer. It’s greatly different than tracking exactly what I’m doing in any room.
Also, consider flats next to each other.
Sure, can privacy advocates stop down playing what we lose because we value privacy though?
There needs to be a balance, location information will be very useful for a lot of things, but only if we have it fully implemented. I want things to sense when I fall and call for help for me. (If I was at a big risk I'd have a button, but for the average young person the risk is non-zero but very small). I want my home automation stuff to figure out where they are and configure themselves. I want my routers to suggest that I'd get better coverage by moving it.
Yes there is privacy concerns and they need to be addressed, but don't lose the good with it.
I think we're all being a little maximalist here? I think it's fair to say this article's focus is on the tech, so it doesn't discuss the cool stuff (incredible VR experience, sci-fi like gesture apps) or the bad stuff (Google knows when you scratch your ass). I think it's reasonable to read an article that doesn't mention any usage restrictions, look at the track record of tech, and worry about the privacy implications.
The Verge includes a whole section on stuff you agree to when purchasing a new laptop when reviewing them. Maybe it's a good idea for us to start insisting on some level of privacy regulation on new tech. This is purely regulatory right, nothing preventing things like VR--just preventing FB from knowing everything you're doing while using their VR headset, and selling that information to others. Maybe that creates an economic constraint, but this seems like a choice consumers can make. For example Amazon sells 2 versions of every Kindle: ad supported and not.
It's starting to feel like the #1 go-forward privacy law needs to be a mandatory opt-in choice requirement, with a viable refuse option.
It can be asked once at the device level, but regulated information needs to be specified at the highest level (e.g. "location information about an individual"), and then the concrete technical implementation left unspecified.
"Does it, or does it not?" is more important than "How?" Because legislation specifying "How?" will always lag technology by decades.
(But then again, this probably should have been done in the mid-90s, once it was apparent which way cookies were going)
Right yeah, or something less like "pay $40 to opt out" either before or after purchase, and more like "earn $0.002/day by selling your usage data". I guess the overall worth of the data is lowered by there being less of it, but whatever.
Who on earth is actually not an advocate for privacy?
> I want things to sense when I fall and call for help for me.
There's no need to sacrifice privacy to achieve this. [0]
> I want my routers to suggest that I'd get better coverage by moving it.
This is really more an issue of proprietary software than a privacy concern, no?
> Yes there is privacy concerns and they need to be addressed, but don't lose the good with it.
Communications are by default expected to be private. Highly public and non-private communications are advertised as such since the use case is so specific and often times, nuanced. In almost all circumstances there is hardly any "good," at all without best-practices privacy protections included.
I cant see through walls with a lightbulb. I can with wifi.
This standard makes my wifi router into an internet connected, closed source blob, light bulb and camera that is impossible to obscure (without killing my internet connection).
Sure, I can wire my whole house for ethernet. And, while I’m behind the drywall, I might as well rip off all the drywall put a layer of Al.
Here’s a business idea - drywall with aluminum fibers embedded in. For those of us who don't want our sexy times recorded by our router.
EDIT: made wifi’s ability to see through walls explicit per _jal’s comment.
QuietRock has drywall that combines soundproofing with RF shielding (steel plate), but it's expensive and targeted at military use cases, https://www.quietrock.com/sites/default/files/QuietRock_530R.... Aluminum radiant barrier can be layered with standard drywall.
2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz have decent wall penetration, but 60GHz doesn't. It can bounce off walls to get around corners, so it doesn't necessarily need line of sight.
Yes, and? 5 and 6 GHz already struggle with thick walls (like those found between units in apartment buildings). Presence detection is one thing, but you can't see what I'm having for lunch through several walls with a single 2.4 GHz AP.
- Unless 2.4 and 5 GHz are taken off the standard, my router will see me through the walls.
- At 60 GHz, if I have wifi, my router can see me
- To make our concerns clear to you, even at 125 mm resolution, you can tell if I like my wife to drill my bottom with a strap on. Or you can tell if I piously say my prayers at night (something that is increasingly political). Or if the immigrant next door spanks his kids. Or if his 15 year old daughter is “exploring” her body.
And for what benefit exactly?
So an ad agency can track me and know Im struggling with my diet, hovering over the fridge door?
Plenty of non-immigrants (won't even dignify that with a label like Americans, because immigrants can become Americans too) spank their kids or hit their wives etc....
I think your fears are real, but I also think it's important to be careful with your examples :)
Another idea in the opposite direction: somebody should build a $20 firewall/tappable ethernet cable with some kind of builtin eBPF support + a universe of community packages.
The community would then share privacy-enhancing I/O profiles for every kind of device. If years later e.g. my adversarial lightbulb pivots to brokering kompromat SIGINT, I want to filter that out, and I want not to be the first one to write a filter like that..
Does it change the internal state of the lightbulb’s logic? No.. but hopefully it would even be able to simulate the state loop of the lightbulb well enough to guess what to filter out.
Of course there may also come a time when somebody starts to sell $20, 60 ghz-spectrum-only-visible “human activity fakers” to disrupt the collection of such data. Maybe with a “Honey, I’m home!” package being the most popular, lol
Funny, when I first signed up it was a reference to a joke that a pizza with radius z and thickness a, its volume is pizza. It's only since then that I've read Snow Crash (a book I do think about quite often..) maybe I should retcon my etymology lol
I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old. It seems this, like a lot of new tech these days, will end up offering little benefit while providing new malicious capabilities.
I'd say it's both ways: inventions perceived as positive at first were later used for nefarious things and the technology used to create military technologies found many civilian applications that turned out very beneficial to the society at large.
Over these years I also realized how little you can do to actually stop research, no matter what your opinions of it are. Even if something is officially forbidden, you can be sure someone else works on it if it's interesting enough, so in the end you're at a disadvantage. There are many examples of it nowadays.
If you look at my comment, you can construe it as even being more negative and cynical, since I'm saying that instead of creating a tool and finding ways to kill with it, we're frequently building tools just to kill with them, and only later we find ways to use them for something non-lethal.
One thing I see 802.1bf ( Sensing ), along with 802.11be ( WiFi 7 ) could be used together in setting up consumer mesh WiFi Network. Home Wireless Networking is still pretty much an unsolved problem for average consumers.
Edit: Turns out there are other comments below mentioning this.
If you live in anything other than an apartment, your wifi connection drops considerably once a few walls and a floor are in the way. Mesh networks solve this by repeating the signal halfway to your hard-to-reach devices, although it must be done in an intelligent way if you want seamless band switching and its performance might be greatly improved with wifi 7's sensing capabilities.
My router is in the basement. Reception is great throughout the house, including the second floor, and even decent out in the garage or on the deck. Similar setup and results for my in-laws who have a massive house (3000-3500 sqft).
Many houses and places of business have walls or floors made with thicker material that block/hinder the waves - things like solid wood floors, brick walls or concrete walls can do a number on even 2.4ghz signals.
Yup - and wiring up a second access point for the upper floors gets rid of all the issues with mesh networks, especially ones from vendors that don't provide dedicated radios to mesh over.
If you don't have the expertise to run ethernet cable yourself, just find local companies that install alarms - they have lots of ways to run and hide cables; it's their job after all!
It's very scary shit. We could soon have no privacy at all in our own homes because of other people's WiFi networks. If the output is strong enough, all you have to do is connect to/crack someone's WiFi and use it to get a layout of all their neighbor's places.
This is a great example of why people don’t have privacy. Ethernet cables exist, and wholly forgo these problems. But, they are less convenient. Consumers complain a lot about privacy, but do little to really demand it. Of course manufacturers deserve much of the blame here for actually implementing these things, but it doesn’t seem as if consumers are trying to steer them in the right direction at all.
> all you have to do is connect to/crack someone's WiFi and use it to get a layout of all their neighbor's places.
It's much worse: neither crack nor connection is required. The technology is entirely passive, it only uses reflections from Wi-Fi radios, same as radar. No connection to the router is required, hence the acronym DFWS (Device-Free Wireless Sensing).
To be clear, this can be done today with $20 ESP32 WiFi devices + custom firmware, i.e. any motivated attacker can already see through the walls of homes and businesses. The Wi-Fi 7 Sensing draft standard is proposing to make this available to everyone.
Perhaps we need a celebrity to help demo SENS transparency of their home walls, to help consumers and regulators understand the implications. That could motivate research investment in privacy controls.
> The Wi-Fi 7 Sensing draft standard is proposing to make this available to everyone.
As your sentence before this says, it already is available to everyone. The only thing wifi 7 opens up is someone with less technical know-how being able to flash openwrt and install some program that extracts and/or visualizes the sensing data, but $20 ESP32's isn't much of a cost to someone looking to use radio wave sensing maliciously right now.
> To be clear, this can be done today with $20 ESP32 WiFi devices + custom firmware, i.e. any motivated attacker can already see through the walls of homes and businesses. The Wi-Fi 7 Sensing draft standard is proposing to make this available to everyone.
It's like you could make a magic flashlight that sees though walls, vs. flipping a switch that turns every wall to glass. It's not a perfect metaphor, sure, but the point is that it's kind of a big step to flip that switch, throw open those floodgates, and to do it with so little fanfare.
> throw open those floodgates, and to do it with so little fanfare.
Exactly. After 10 years of research and hundreds of published papers, there is a huge gap to be bridged with consumers, regulators and lawyers, before dramatically changing the definition of "fitness for purpose" in wireless networking, https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/#external
There is a difference between consumer benefits and maybe industrial benefits. Maybe it might make communication between sorting bots more accurate and quicker.
There seems to be a lot of FUD about this. Make no mistake, the malicious and privacy invasive applications are already being used; they just don't follow a IEEE spec and aren't associated with WiFi directly.
If a maliciously controlled router wants to track you it already can because your phone, smart watch, and laptop already broadcast themselves.
This technology may not seem useful to the purpose of WiFi on it's face but that couldn't be further from the truth. Knowing the population of a room in terms of devices but also people is useful for WiFi deployment planning and power level optimization. 2000 people with 2 devices is different from 4000 individual people.
People already have WiFi enabled lights and other sensors so providing a standard for object & people detection will make those use cases even better.
Elmer Fud is a character from the Warmer Brothers Bugs Bunny animated series of children's cartoons and used as a mnemonic device. I assume the ELMER acronym is some set of metrics used to judge the validity of a claim to determine if it is FUD or not.
The hypothetical in this is that this suddenly opens the door to RF-based physical sensing, when every attacker that can gain from this is already using it, just via custom equipment.
I interpret it as eliminating the barrier to entry to those that know how to set up custom equipment. I haven't tried, so I don't know how large that barrier is, but it seems safe to say there's a very low probability a random person could accomplish it now vs when it's default hardware and requires no technical expertise.
>People already have WiFi enabled lights and other sensors so providing a standard for object & people detection will make those use cases even better.
Yet another reason I prefer Zwave for my home automation communications. Sure you could probably use it in the same way, but it won't be handed to you on a silver platter like the wifi stuff discussed here!
This is not a future I'd like to see. What bothers me even more, is that if the neighbors above me decide to join an "Apple Security Sensing Program" by toggling it on, it may as well be sensing and logging my activity.
Other than that, I do have a lot of ESP32s at my place sensing for activity via IR as well as by creating an FFT-"audio" log. No sound just FFT aggregated over one second, but all these devices store the data on my home server, not in some cloud.
I feed fft data into machine learning system for signal classification. It’s a nice real time system with midrange Xilinx ZynQ SoC. Some Xilinx IP blocks with hand written classification engine.
I guess author wants to classify sounds in his environment too.
Correct, the ultimate goal is to perform automatic activity logging.
For example my bathroom has two IR sensors (https://www.amazon.de/dp/B08LBDYPYD), one inside the shower, one outside of it. This lets me log the time and duration of when I take a shower or how often I shave.
It also has an I2S MEMS microphone which collects the data for the FFT where the goal is to replace the IR in the shower with it since the water sound is enough information.
Also temperature and humidity, where the latter also gives a good indication of when I showered and when I forgot to close the window some time after showering.
My bedroom also has the same "setup", where the FFT shows me how big of a problem I have with snoring. Eventually I can add some logic on the server to slightly wake me up if I snore, but currently I'm just logging. The PIR serves as a measurement of how much I'm moving at night without requiring a camera for this. Though I have another ESP32 under my bed fixated at the slatted frame which contains an 9dof-IMU and logs any significant movement which may be related to quality of sleep. Also the magnetic field which is why I have a strong magnet attached to my bed tablet, so I know when it changed position. Even though the tablet knows that itself because it is logging its own accelerometer every minute.
I live alone, so all of this is no problem.
At this point I'm mostly only logging, and only using the shower and bed data to see when I used them, which I can then see in Grafana. I think the data will only gain value when watched over a long time frame.
No, it's not related. I'm trying to get notified when my noodle water has started boiling, but even with an humidity sensor in the kitchen it's pretty hard to tell when it's about to boil, so that the heat can be lowered before it splashes around. And the FFT in the kitchen is somewhat broken so I can't use it, there may be a lot of noise in the mains or something like that. In any case I've planned to replace the setup in the kitchen months ago, but never moved on to doing it.
The evidence I use to determine when water is about to boil is my ears. I hear a staccato creaky sound that accelerates just before water boils, that is very distinct and easily picked up by microphone. (Curiously, I've never seriously asked what makes this sound, physically.) How do rice cookers do it?
I remember when first contactless payment options appeared, many people started buying anti-RFID wallets and bags. I'm not sure if they're still a thing, but the people who need "radio-privacy" will definitely find a way.
I have a few wallets with alleged RFID blocking. For those its mainly to stop arse grabbing attacks where card info (or security badge info) could be cloned with a little badge reader held in someone's palm.
Smart cards store secret keys and modifiable internal state on-device. Older smart cards, with for example a MIFARE chip from around the year 2000, can be cloned relatively easily because they have many vulnerabilities, but newer cards with for example an NXP SmartMX2 P60 are, to date, impossible to clone unless you have access to the card for a large amount of time.
You'd also be surprised how powerful smart cards are these days. the aforementioned NXP chip has 586 KB ROM, 144 KB EEPROM and 11 KB RAM, crypto coprocessors for RSA/ECC/DES/AES, and a 32-bit CPU.
> What bothers me even more, is that if the neighbors above me decide to join an "Apple Security Sensing Program" by toggling it on, it may as well be sensing and logging my activity.
60 Ghz is heavily blocked by walls, glass and doors, even more than 5Ghz, so that's very unlikely scenario.
I want my Wi-Fi to deliver me fast internet access, not track my position. Have a feeling this will be used for il-intent and monetized by future routers
If there's one thing I learnt the last decade, it's to not underestimate how even the shittiest of tech, like a smart fridge or an iot juice press, will become must-haves for the consuming class. In this case, perhaps it's "find my keys", "alert me when my toddler wakes up", "metaverse body tracking", etc/whatever.
Yeah, I realized we are on a far side of the bridge when I saw how many people in the USA decided to buy their Echos. It is estimated the USA has ca. 140 housing units, and that there are 40 millions of Echos in use now. A device I would refuse to install in my house even if someone paid me a lot for it.
Customers also didn't ask for even more ads and tracking in their TV, but they did ask for cheaper devices - the result is that you'll have to shell out serious bucks for "digital signage"-style displays if you want to live in peace.
Warehouse and asset tracking and management is the number customer of this technology. On consumer router this will be just a marketing bullet points. Find your car key were you always put them but forgot.
I don't need more than a few hundred megabits on the go, thank you very much. If I want to go faster, and Ethernet cable is always a faster solution with less moving parts.
i can tell when an ssh connection in my own apartment is going over wifi rather than the ethernet cable (if the session open before connecting the ethernet) - is it a weak signal? yes, but it's not a big apartment. With a modern router, sitting right next to it, i've never seen a connection that exceeds my gigabit ethernet.
Through all these years, ethernet always works, wifi is more often than not the culprit of connectivity issues. Moving my chromecast on to ethernet (which was one of the closest wifi devices to the router) has lead to higher quality, less stalling.
i've had my 5ghz wifi disappear because of weather radar, can't say the same for my cabled connections.
What are you talking about, providing you fast internet access doesn't maximize the benefit for me and my shareholders. We need your exact location, eye movement, and heart rate every second so we can do better invasive target advertisements, or sell these to other companies.
> it has been shown that SENS-based classifiers can infer privacy-critical information such as keyboard typing, gesture recognition and activity tracking ... since Wi-Fi signals can penetrate hard objects and can be used without the presence of light, end-users may not even realize they are being tracked ... individuals should be provided the opportunity to opt out of SENS services – in other words, to avoid being monitored and tracked by the Wi-Fi devices around them. This would require the widespread introduction of reliable SENS algorithm for human or animal identification.
Would this require a worldwide database of biometric signatures for each human that opts out?
No, the future is decentralized. In the US, you will always be tracked because of regulatory capture of the FCC. In Europe, your phone will display a tracking consent pop-up everytime you go into a cafe. If you don't comply, you will have to get your coffee and free wifi elsewhere.
My concern is that people opting out of this protocol won't actually be opting out of the sensing technology. Any attacker trying to sense keystrokes using RF waves already can do that and won't be hindered by some opt out program nor be considered whether or not wifi 7 sensing is allowed to be part of new routers.
SWAT teams, home burglars and the NSA will all be clients for the data.
Once the granularity gets fine enough, movements involved in prayers, sex and elimination of waste can all be monitored remotely by state actors.
Malware from around the world will now be able to transmit details of your body movements back to their controllers.
Imagine being able to blackmail you because malware detected you having sex when your partner was away or performing Muslim prayers in an islamophobic society.
Technology can't be stopped by individual engineers refusing to invent it, it can only be stopped by everyone agreeing on the ways it shouldn't be used. So it was for arson (fire), homicide (every weapon since the rock), and obscene material (all communications technology), and so must it be for privacy and the various techniques of monitoring us.
It isn't just you, but it should be. The privacy implications are potentially disturbing and need to be address (I have no idea how). However there are also a lot of real uses for this that will make your life better. Some of those are things we haven't thought of yet.
> Imagine that someone wants to illegally track the position of a person inside a laboratory, for instance to measure how much time is spent doing different activities at different desks, as depicted in the upper picture. How much effective can this attack be? ... With CSI-MURDER, the localization becomes impossible because results will seem random, thus preserving the person privacy without destroying Wi-Fi communications.
> other comments that question the ratio of benefit vs. risk
I think it is important to note that different people will have different inputs into benefits and risk. E.g. a 24 year old male living alone probably doesn't have a use case for elderly fall detection, etc. But, a 75 year old woman living alone probably does.
Also, I am of the opinion that is possible to do this properly (i.e. securely and privacy preserving). Case in point: people carry microphones (in phones) that can record any audio with them... but they do it because they trust that their phone is secure and private.
I can see ISPs forcing you to use their modem with this WiFi built in. Then even if you put it in bridge mode, the WiFi stays active while it tracks you.
If an exclusive/monopoly ISP took that approach, the modem could be surrounded by copper mesh which allows air circulation for cooling, but impedes RF.
> Outside of fine-grained location tracking, UWB is also used for radar sensing. Google is using UWB for its Soli radar, which is embedded in the most recent Nest Hub display to track respiration during sleep ... Novelda, argues that UWB sensing is more effective than the traditional motion sensors that hotels have historically deployed because they can sense a person even when they are still by “seeing” micromovements made by the person’s breathing. Lenovo embedded the Novelda chip into its laptops as a way to keep the screen on only when a person is in front of it, which helps save on battery power.
This is great because, finally we can start selling ads with verified "proximal views" to advertisers and make more money! In fact we can think of all the wonderful product synergies here. For example, we can increase the number of proximal views by automatically locking the smart lock in their room so they can't get out for the duration of the ad. Or we can lock the doors of our smart cars while the ads are playing, that's up to 6 verified viewers all at once! We can have ad screen on toilet stalls that autoplay when someone s(h)its. Your phone can start playing ads whenever you come near it! The possibilities here are endless
This could easily fall within the realm of the Supreme Court's decision in KYLLO v. UNITED STATES where it was ruled that a thermal imaging search of a home is a violation of the US 4th amendment.
How much additional value does this provide vs the addition of ToF information in beacons that already exists?
This seems primarily about providing tracking capabilities to operators whereas ToF provides tracking to the people who are actually trying to do positioning. The privacy implications are worrying.
Cisco has been doing something like this with Angle of Arrival with a 16 antenna array for the past few years. It’s pretty cool but only works in perfect setups, and the antennas need to be mounted above you.
It's most probably meant for opportunistic sensing in industrial environments, where it might become quite useful. It's not something you're going to use at home.
Since this is passive sensing, an attacker outside your home can make use of the WiFi signals emitted from the router inside your home. Or they can broadcast their own signal.
Authorities aren't restricted from using a lie detector in the US, just from using the results in court. They're frequently used to pressure suspects in criminal cases during questioning, knowing the results are inadmissable.
Of course there are all sorts of positive applications for the user. It's just their number is dwarfed by the real purpose of these things. We've known they've been coming for a while. Now they here and we'll have to fight it, then lose.
They've been making that tech for years, every office and school classroom I've been to in the last 10 years has that now. This is just another stupid shot in the dark. Maybe someday someone will actually find a useful purpose. We are limited by what we can't even imagine so there's always hope but until then, I'll let those with deep pockets spend the energy trying to find a good use for it.
> lights turning on automatically when you enter a room
Was this really it? Or did they have some use-case not currently covered by motion sensors?
I can see some potential use for security (cheap REX sensors can be easily tricked, allowing unauthorized access into secure areas). The fix is obvious (stop cheaping out on your REX sensors) but I can envision someone trying to bill wifi sensing as the hip new solution for REX systems.
Mass surveillance. Only through warrants, of course.
Or, you know, if a cop wants to stalk their ex-gf, or an isp tech support nerd wants to stalk a customer. Or any script kiddie or petty criminal can get hold of your wifi password or drop his own AP in your house.
Nothing to see here. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
I've long had an obsession with energy savings and heating, and I think the best way to save energy on heating is by heating people instead of building. With accurate person detection in a room, you could shine low intensity IR at their exact position to keep them warm without wasting energy on heating the rest of the room.
But yeah, I think we can all expect this will be used to monitor behaviour in stores, to spy on people in homes, to rob us and to throw more "relevant" advertising in our faces.
Then make a dedicated fall detector and sell it to the elderly. They already make wrist bands with panic buttons that phone for help, put the sensor in the phone hub just in case they fall and lose consciousness.
> The only real practical example is fall detection, what's the real purpose of this?
I can think of few real world applications. Eg. I have autism and air filter. Air filter working on full power is very uncomfortable for me, but with position sensing, it can be configured to run more often when I'm not in room. Motion sensing isn't exactly a solution, because I can be very still.
Automated light management is sensible too. It can also be used to automatically turn off lights if I fall asleep.
> Great article. To get out ahead of this, I’ll go ahead and pre-write this for the IEEE. They’re going to need it in a few months.
> “The IEEE has heard the concerns of consumers and takes privacy very seriously. We recognize that the potential value of the proposed standard is enormous, but that it must be paired with technologies that prevent it’s misuse in an ever more dangerous cyber world. As such, we are delaying the implementation of this technology in the .bf standard, and we will re-address it once we have come to a consensus across all stakeholders including privacy and consumer advocates.”</i>
> This paper reports ongoing efforts by the IEEE 802.11bf Task Group (TGbf), which is defining the appropriate modifications to existing Wi-Fi standards to enhance sensing capabilities through 802.11-compliant waveforms.
> we could use terahertz spectrum to detect specific molecules and in turn use terahertz frequencies and radios as a way to track specific ingredients in food or pollutants in the air.
> The Sengled Smart Health Monitoring Light is a dual Wi-Fi / Bluetooth bulb with built-in health monitoring using radar technology. It’s designed to track your sleep and certain biometric measurements, such as heart rate and body temperature, as well as other vital signs. The bulb can work alone, or multiple bulbs connected via a Bluetooth mesh network work together to create a virtual map that can help detect human behavior.
Your next door neighbor’s wifi will know your every movement, and can probably image it too.
End of privacy within closed doors.
I guess I always thought that should be sacred space.
> In 2012, her work on Sparse Fourier Transforms was chosen as one of the top 10 breakthroughs of the year by Technology Review ... In 2014, on the celebration of Project Mac's 50th anniversary, her work on X-ray vision was chosen as one of the "50 ways that MIT has transformed computer science."
I need this, room occupancy is still not a cleanly solved problem for home automation. Most methods relies on BLE or phone wifi but that sucks in many ways.
Wouldn't this have to be constantly transmitting to work? I can't imagine the amount of interference this would create. The lower frequencies are already congested enough...
I'm surprised that there's not a single comment here about 802.11ay which is also 60GHz. Each channel on that standard can do something like 40Gbps, which is nuts. From Wikipedia[0]:
> The link-rate per stream is 44 Gbit/s, with four streams this goes up to 176 Gbit/s.
Yes, it can't penetrate walls, but is huge for point to point communication. Think VR headset bandwidth, file transfers between devices, wireless backhaul between buildings. It's not just for spying on your cat.
I think it's important to remember that it's not magic, it's just radio waves. You can "sense" with a lot more resolution if you use a camera and light bulb. There are plenty of eyeballs, cameras, and lights all around you right now. Even worse, someone could be looking in your window with binoculars.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ay
> You can "sense" with a lot more resolution if you use a camera and light bulb.
(Visible) Light has a frequency of around 400-790 THz, which explains why it has a inherently better resolution.
Yep!
https://www.rtinsights.com/li-fi-a-new-wireless-alternative-...
> Li-Fi connections are broadcast over the air through a light-emitting diodes (LED) broadcaster and support rates up to 100Gbit/s ... Li-Fi can also serve to identify an object’s indoor position more accurately than Wi-Fi or GPS used today (less than 2cm and less than 3 degrees of orientation while it is providing real-time localization (less than 34ms). This accuracy is vital in multiple applications such as navigation In-Door Robots and Drones, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Gaming, among others ... it cannot go through walls, and thus a private local area network (LAN) can be created by lighting up a closed room ... Any organization that needs to keep information within the four walls, such as military bases and banks, can use the technology to keep data restricted to a single room.
There's potential for visible-light networking but the Li-Fi people in particular are complete garbage. They claim visible light travels faster than radio waves and say Li-Fi is a hundred times faster than wi-fi but their thousand dollar router can only do 100Mb/s. They also rip off the Wi-Fi Alliance logo.
That's disappointing, sounds like they need competition.
Oh, I have been dreaming about LiFi for some time, if what you're saying it's true, that's... disappointing. Do you have any sources about the current state of (real-world) LiFi ?
Literally their website.
Who specifically is "their"?
https://lifi.co/lifi-vs-wifi/
It does not address the issues outlined by parent at all
Which Li-fi people? AFAICT there are several groups, and li-fi.co (which I'll assume you're talking about) is less advertising for one specific group, and more advocating for the technology as a whole.
> They claim visible light travels faster than radio waves
I wasn't able to find it on the lifi website but seems like some poor copywriter got something wrong
> their thousand dollar router can only do 100Mb/s
Who's they? In any case, since lifi.co is advocating Li-Fi as a whole so it makes sense they talk about theoretical speeds, whereas a specific router from some manufacturer might not be able to reach those speeds, considering how new the technology is
In the end, I imagine Li-Fi doesn't have much of a future outside of niche markets because it has to compete with wifi which is everywhere (and it can't supplant wifi because e.g. it doesn't work in your pocket)
https://lifi.co/lifi-vs-wifi/
Another big advantage of LiFi is that the usage of light allows LiFi connections to occur almost instantaneously because light travels at extremely fast speeds. This results in faster transmission of data and faster internet connections – about 100 times faster than speeds achievable by WiFi.
https://lifi.co/lifi-products/lifimax/
$1098 Guaranteed fast data transfer with 100 Mbps download & 100 Mbps upload.
Yes and no. So you have to have a cable again to every room (for the AP), because the wifi signal can't go thru walls?
I hope then you can dissable the lower frequencys, because now you have 5 or more APs in your appartement.
So if I don’t want anyone taking a WiFi “photo” of me on the throne I should put up aluminum foil curtains?
Wear a tin foil hat. And take a photo of yourself anyways cause a guy on the throne with a tin foil hat on sounds hilarious
I think there is a subreddit for it.
Watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrxWiU_v9Qs
> It's not just for spying on your cat.
Can we stop downplaying privacy issues please?
Not trying to be provocative, but how is this any worse than existing cameras or motion sensors?
Do you have those at home?
RF is far less hindered by stuff like walls.
With cameras and motion sensors you more or less know how they'll be used and as a user you can choose to disable them (or at the very least block them if you can't disable them).
With this technology, it will be integrated into your router (and clients?), so turning those off will mean to turn off WiFi altogether. Added to that, I'll bet that most people wouldn't even begin to imagine that WiFi could be used for sensing people, and they'll continue using WiFi without being aware for the grave privacy implications.
There's no reason to assume any of that.
> With this technology, it will be integrated into your router (and clients?), so turning those off will mean to turn off WiFi altogether.
It's rather unreasonable to think that you won't be able to turn off band on router. Especially given fact that 60Ghz is heavily shielded by _doors_, so any usable router would require fallback 2.4/5/6 Ghz connectivity.
802.11bf Wi-Fi 7 Sensing works with all frequencies, 2.4 and up.
Even if Neighbor 2 turns off their router, Neighbor 1 could passively use the radio waves from Neighbor 3's router to surveil reflections from Neighbor 2, including keyboard typing, heartrate/breathing, location and physical activity.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27123493
The problem with this neighbor-spying fear is that "complex math using data from radio waves to sense stuff" is already possible and readily available by anyone willing to study and put in the world of building it, wifi 7 isn't suddenly enabling that part of rf analysis or mathematics.
> wifi 7 isn't suddenly enabling that part of rf analysis or mathematics
It makes it suddenly ubiquitous when all new WiFi devices use the new standard.
Removing the PhD-level knowledge requirement from this particular mode of being an asshole doesn't sound like much of an improvement
yes, but the real threat with this is not that it makes something possible that is already possible, but it makes the barrier to use that tech a LOT lower.
Wrapping my house in tin foil is sounding a lot less conspiracy theorist now! Actually my house is going to be stuccoed - I wonder if they are using a metal mesh that I can ground. Hmm...
Your next door neighbor’s wifi will know your every movement, and can probably image it too. End of privacy within closed doors.
This is hyperbole. 60GHz cannot penetrate walls and closed doors. 2.4GHz and 5GHz lack the resolution to image you, especially if your adversary only has control of one AP. There are already tons of side channel attacks with existing WiFi and Bluetooth that reveal when someone is in the area. Your neighbour could already be tracking your devices, for all you know.
Here are 400 research papers on Wi-Fi sensing with 2.4/5Ghz, https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/#external
Thank you! Also, I can lid the device in a drawer. It’s greatly different than tracking exactly what I’m doing in any room. Also, consider flats next to each other.
Sure, can privacy advocates stop down playing what we lose because we value privacy though?
There needs to be a balance, location information will be very useful for a lot of things, but only if we have it fully implemented. I want things to sense when I fall and call for help for me. (If I was at a big risk I'd have a button, but for the average young person the risk is non-zero but very small). I want my home automation stuff to figure out where they are and configure themselves. I want my routers to suggest that I'd get better coverage by moving it.
Yes there is privacy concerns and they need to be addressed, but don't lose the good with it.
I think we're all being a little maximalist here? I think it's fair to say this article's focus is on the tech, so it doesn't discuss the cool stuff (incredible VR experience, sci-fi like gesture apps) or the bad stuff (Google knows when you scratch your ass). I think it's reasonable to read an article that doesn't mention any usage restrictions, look at the track record of tech, and worry about the privacy implications.
The Verge includes a whole section on stuff you agree to when purchasing a new laptop when reviewing them. Maybe it's a good idea for us to start insisting on some level of privacy regulation on new tech. This is purely regulatory right, nothing preventing things like VR--just preventing FB from knowing everything you're doing while using their VR headset, and selling that information to others. Maybe that creates an economic constraint, but this seems like a choice consumers can make. For example Amazon sells 2 versions of every Kindle: ad supported and not.
It's starting to feel like the #1 go-forward privacy law needs to be a mandatory opt-in choice requirement, with a viable refuse option.
It can be asked once at the device level, but regulated information needs to be specified at the highest level (e.g. "location information about an individual"), and then the concrete technical implementation left unspecified.
"Does it, or does it not?" is more important than "How?" Because legislation specifying "How?" will always lag technology by decades.
(But then again, this probably should have been done in the mid-90s, once it was apparent which way cookies were going)
Right yeah, or something less like "pay $40 to opt out" either before or after purchase, and more like "earn $0.002/day by selling your usage data". I guess the overall worth of the data is lowered by there being less of it, but whatever.
No, because your "balance" will land in the middle, which is to say that it will outright destroy a great deal of privacy.
> privacy advocates
Who on earth is actually not an advocate for privacy?
> I want things to sense when I fall and call for help for me.
There's no need to sacrifice privacy to achieve this. [0]
> I want my routers to suggest that I'd get better coverage by moving it.
This is really more an issue of proprietary software than a privacy concern, no?
> Yes there is privacy concerns and they need to be addressed, but don't lose the good with it.
Communications are by default expected to be private. Highly public and non-private communications are advertised as such since the use case is so specific and often times, nuanced. In almost all circumstances there is hardly any "good," at all without best-practices privacy protections included.
[0] https://mbientlab.com/store/
As a privacy nut I would be a lot more into this kind of tech if it didn't require connecting to the cloud.
I'm fine for this as long as it is opt-IN
Clearly you've not met my cat.
I cant see through walls with a lightbulb. I can with wifi.
This standard makes my wifi router into an internet connected, closed source blob, light bulb and camera that is impossible to obscure (without killing my internet connection).
Sure, I can wire my whole house for ethernet. And, while I’m behind the drywall, I might as well rip off all the drywall put a layer of Al.
Here’s a business idea - drywall with aluminum fibers embedded in. For those of us who don't want our sexy times recorded by our router.
EDIT: made wifi’s ability to see through walls explicit per _jal’s comment.
> drywall with aluminum fibers embedded
QuietRock has drywall that combines soundproofing with RF shielding (steel plate), but it's expensive and targeted at military use cases, https://www.quietrock.com/sites/default/files/QuietRock_530R.... Aluminum radiant barrier can be layered with standard drywall.
There is conductive carbon paint for RF shielding, e.g. http://www.emfrf.com/shielding-of-electric-fields-in-a-resid... & https://www.zokazola.com/emf_reduction.html
Other materials: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29902926
To put a slightly finer point on it, I can't see through your walls with my lightbulb, but I probably can see through your walls with my router.
Your creepy neighbor in the apartment next door is getting a new toy.
2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz have decent wall penetration, but 60GHz doesn't. It can bounce off walls to get around corners, so it doesn't necessarily need line of sight.
Wi-Fi Sensing works with 2.4/5/6 GHz which pass through walls, it is not specific to 60Ghz.
Yes, and? 5 and 6 GHz already struggle with thick walls (like those found between units in apartment buildings). Presence detection is one thing, but you can't see what I'm having for lunch through several walls with a single 2.4 GHz AP.
500 terahertz = 600 nm (visible light)
60 gigahertz = 5 mm
6 gigahertz = 50 mm
5 gigahertz = 60 mm
2.4 gigahertz = 125 mm
“Yes and”
- Unless 2.4 and 5 GHz are taken off the standard, my router will see me through the walls.
- At 60 GHz, if I have wifi, my router can see me
- To make our concerns clear to you, even at 125 mm resolution, you can tell if I like my wife to drill my bottom with a strap on. Or you can tell if I piously say my prayers at night (something that is increasingly political). Or if the immigrant next door spanks his kids. Or if his 15 year old daughter is “exploring” her body.
And for what benefit exactly?
So an ad agency can track me and know Im struggling with my diet, hovering over the fridge door?
> Or if the immigrant next door spanks his kids.
Plenty of non-immigrants (won't even dignify that with a label like Americans, because immigrants can become Americans too) spank their kids or hit their wives etc....
I think your fears are real, but I also think it's important to be careful with your examples :)
Another idea in the opposite direction: somebody should build a $20 firewall/tappable ethernet cable with some kind of builtin eBPF support + a universe of community packages.
The community would then share privacy-enhancing I/O profiles for every kind of device. If years later e.g. my adversarial lightbulb pivots to brokering kompromat SIGINT, I want to filter that out, and I want not to be the first one to write a filter like that..
Does it change the internal state of the lightbulb’s logic? No.. but hopefully it would even be able to simulate the state loop of the lightbulb well enough to guess what to filter out.
Of course there may also come a time when somebody starts to sell $20, 60 ghz-spectrum-only-visible “human activity fakers” to disrupt the collection of such data. Maybe with a “Honey, I’m home!” package being the most popular, lol
When I read this comment and the username that wrote it, I can't help but wonder if it's a reference to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.
Funny, when I first signed up it was a reference to a joke that a pizza with radius z and thickness a, its volume is pizza. It's only since then that I've read Snow Crash (a book I do think about quite often..) maybe I should retcon my etymology lol
> drywall with aluminum fibers embedded in. For those of us who don't want our sexy times recorded by our router.
The ancients had a solution for this (brick walls).
Along with plaster-and-lathe there was also plaster on a wire mesh. Old houses with these kind of plaster walls get terrible cell phone reception.
I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old. It seems this, like a lot of new tech these days, will end up offering little benefit while providing new malicious capabilities.
It's been the same throughout history. Invent a tool...use it to kill.
I wouldn't be as negative.
Frequently we create the tool in order to kill with it.
After that we also use to tool to create.
We're equally capable of good and evil and yes, we are frequently good, too.
It's not negative, it's true.
I'd say it's both ways: inventions perceived as positive at first were later used for nefarious things and the technology used to create military technologies found many civilian applications that turned out very beneficial to the society at large.
Over these years I also realized how little you can do to actually stop research, no matter what your opinions of it are. Even if something is officially forbidden, you can be sure someone else works on it if it's interesting enough, so in the end you're at a disadvantage. There are many examples of it nowadays.
Literalism is a killer.
It can be both at the same time.
If you look at my comment, you can construe it as even being more negative and cynical, since I'm saying that instead of creating a tool and finding ways to kill with it, we're frequently building tools just to kill with them, and only later we find ways to use them for something non-lethal.
...also the other way: a lot of inventions were used in the civil world just after being designed and developed in the military one.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones ..."
One thing I see 802.1bf ( Sensing ), along with 802.11be ( WiFi 7 ) could be used together in setting up consumer mesh WiFi Network. Home Wireless Networking is still pretty much an unsolved problem for average consumers.
Edit: Turns out there are other comments below mentioning this.
"Home Wireless Networking is still pretty much an unsolved problem for average consumers."
What do you mean? Most consumers have a wireless router, and that works for their needs.
If you live in anything other than an apartment, your wifi connection drops considerably once a few walls and a floor are in the way. Mesh networks solve this by repeating the signal halfway to your hard-to-reach devices, although it must be done in an intelligent way if you want seamless band switching and its performance might be greatly improved with wifi 7's sensing capabilities.
My router is in the basement. Reception is great throughout the house, including the second floor, and even decent out in the garage or on the deck. Similar setup and results for my in-laws who have a massive house (3000-3500 sqft).
Many houses and places of business have walls or floors made with thicker material that block/hinder the waves - things like solid wood floors, brick walls or concrete walls can do a number on even 2.4ghz signals.
The in-laws have hardwood floors on both levels. I haven't seen internal masonry walls in most places.
Even if that is a concern, I don't see sensing as being a benefit.
Yup - and wiring up a second access point for the upper floors gets rid of all the issues with mesh networks, especially ones from vendors that don't provide dedicated radios to mesh over.
If you don't have the expertise to run ethernet cable yourself, just find local companies that install alarms - they have lots of ways to run and hide cables; it's their job after all!
It's very scary shit. We could soon have no privacy at all in our own homes because of other people's WiFi networks. If the output is strong enough, all you have to do is connect to/crack someone's WiFi and use it to get a layout of all their neighbor's places.
This is a great example of why people don’t have privacy. Ethernet cables exist, and wholly forgo these problems. But, they are less convenient. Consumers complain a lot about privacy, but do little to really demand it. Of course manufacturers deserve much of the blame here for actually implementing these things, but it doesn’t seem as if consumers are trying to steer them in the right direction at all.
Yep. I have ethernet cables throughout the house and use it for most stuff. I still have a wireless router for the phones though.
> all you have to do is connect to/crack someone's WiFi and use it to get a layout of all their neighbor's places.
It's much worse: neither crack nor connection is required. The technology is entirely passive, it only uses reflections from Wi-Fi radios, same as radar. No connection to the router is required, hence the acronym DFWS (Device-Free Wireless Sensing).
To be clear, this can be done today with $20 ESP32 WiFi devices + custom firmware, i.e. any motivated attacker can already see through the walls of homes and businesses. The Wi-Fi 7 Sensing draft standard is proposing to make this available to everyone.
Perhaps we need a celebrity to help demo SENS transparency of their home walls, to help consumers and regulators understand the implications. That could motivate research investment in privacy controls.
More details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901979
> The Wi-Fi 7 Sensing draft standard is proposing to make this available to everyone.
As your sentence before this says, it already is available to everyone. The only thing wifi 7 opens up is someone with less technical know-how being able to flash openwrt and install some program that extracts and/or visualizes the sensing data, but $20 ESP32's isn't much of a cost to someone looking to use radio wave sensing maliciously right now.
> To be clear, this can be done today with $20 ESP32 WiFi devices + custom firmware, i.e. any motivated attacker can already see through the walls of homes and businesses. The Wi-Fi 7 Sensing draft standard is proposing to make this available to everyone.
It's like you could make a magic flashlight that sees though walls, vs. flipping a switch that turns every wall to glass. It's not a perfect metaphor, sure, but the point is that it's kind of a big step to flip that switch, throw open those floodgates, and to do it with so little fanfare.
> throw open those floodgates, and to do it with so little fanfare.
Exactly. After 10 years of research and hundreds of published papers, there is a huge gap to be bridged with consumers, regulators and lawyers, before dramatically changing the definition of "fitness for purpose" in wireless networking, https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/#external
There is a difference between consumer benefits and maybe industrial benefits. Maybe it might make communication between sorting bots more accurate and quicker.
Doubtful. Beam forming would be more beneficial.
There seems to be a lot of FUD about this. Make no mistake, the malicious and privacy invasive applications are already being used; they just don't follow a IEEE spec and aren't associated with WiFi directly.
If a maliciously controlled router wants to track you it already can because your phone, smart watch, and laptop already broadcast themselves.
This technology may not seem useful to the purpose of WiFi on it's face but that couldn't be further from the truth. Knowing the population of a room in terms of devices but also people is useful for WiFi deployment planning and power level optimization. 2000 people with 2 devices is different from 4000 individual people.
People already have WiFi enabled lights and other sensors so providing a standard for object & people detection will make those use cases even better.
So there’s FUD about something we should already reasonably have FUD about?
When analysing FUD always use the ELMER acronym
E - Expectations
L - Lifetime
M - Motivation
E - Environment
R - Reward
:-)
Can you elaborate? What is this?
I interpreted it as a joke. Elmer Fudd is a cartoon character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_Fudd
Elmer Fud is a character from the Warmer Brothers Bugs Bunny animated series of children's cartoons and used as a mnemonic device. I assume the ELMER acronym is some set of metrics used to judge the validity of a claim to determine if it is FUD or not.
It's not FUD. There's nothing hypothetical about the danger.
The hypothetical in this is that this suddenly opens the door to RF-based physical sensing, when every attacker that can gain from this is already using it, just via custom equipment.
I interpret it as eliminating the barrier to entry to those that know how to set up custom equipment. I haven't tried, so I don't know how large that barrier is, but it seems safe to say there's a very low probability a random person could accomplish it now vs when it's default hardware and requires no technical expertise.
There was also a lot of FUD about what data the feds were collecting about the general public during the Bush era. Then the Snowden leaks happened.
>People already have WiFi enabled lights and other sensors so providing a standard for object & people detection will make those use cases even better.
Yet another reason I prefer Zwave for my home automation communications. Sure you could probably use it in the same way, but it won't be handed to you on a silver platter like the wifi stuff discussed here!
This is not a future I'd like to see. What bothers me even more, is that if the neighbors above me decide to join an "Apple Security Sensing Program" by toggling it on, it may as well be sensing and logging my activity.
Other than that, I do have a lot of ESP32s at my place sensing for activity via IR as well as by creating an FFT-"audio" log. No sound just FFT aggregated over one second, but all these devices store the data on my home server, not in some cloud.
Tell us more about the home sensors why ir? And what is the fft data for?
I feed fft data into machine learning system for signal classification. It’s a nice real time system with midrange Xilinx ZynQ SoC. Some Xilinx IP blocks with hand written classification engine.
I guess author wants to classify sounds in his environment too.
Correct, the ultimate goal is to perform automatic activity logging.
For example my bathroom has two IR sensors (https://www.amazon.de/dp/B08LBDYPYD), one inside the shower, one outside of it. This lets me log the time and duration of when I take a shower or how often I shave.
It also has an I2S MEMS microphone which collects the data for the FFT where the goal is to replace the IR in the shower with it since the water sound is enough information.
Also temperature and humidity, where the latter also gives a good indication of when I showered and when I forgot to close the window some time after showering.
My bedroom also has the same "setup", where the FFT shows me how big of a problem I have with snoring. Eventually I can add some logic on the server to slightly wake me up if I snore, but currently I'm just logging. The PIR serves as a measurement of how much I'm moving at night without requiring a camera for this. Though I have another ESP32 under my bed fixated at the slatted frame which contains an 9dof-IMU and logs any significant movement which may be related to quality of sleep. Also the magnetic field which is why I have a strong magnet attached to my bed tablet, so I know when it changed position. Even though the tablet knows that itself because it is logging its own accelerometer every minute.
I live alone, so all of this is no problem.
At this point I'm mostly only logging, and only using the shower and bed data to see when I used them, which I can then see in Grafana. I think the data will only gain value when watched over a long time frame.
I remember seeing a Hackaday post that uses FFT/spectogram to infer IoT things such as boiling kettle without cameras. Is this related?
No, it's not related. I'm trying to get notified when my noodle water has started boiling, but even with an humidity sensor in the kitchen it's pretty hard to tell when it's about to boil, so that the heat can be lowered before it splashes around. And the FFT in the kitchen is somewhat broken so I can't use it, there may be a lot of noise in the mains or something like that. In any case I've planned to replace the setup in the kitchen months ago, but never moved on to doing it.
The evidence I use to determine when water is about to boil is my ears. I hear a staccato creaky sound that accelerates just before water boils, that is very distinct and easily picked up by microphone. (Curiously, I've never seriously asked what makes this sound, physically.) How do rice cookers do it?
I remember when first contactless payment options appeared, many people started buying anti-RFID wallets and bags. I'm not sure if they're still a thing, but the people who need "radio-privacy" will definitely find a way.
I have a few wallets with alleged RFID blocking. For those its mainly to stop arse grabbing attacks where card info (or security badge info) could be cloned with a little badge reader held in someone's palm.
Smart cards store secret keys and modifiable internal state on-device. Older smart cards, with for example a MIFARE chip from around the year 2000, can be cloned relatively easily because they have many vulnerabilities, but newer cards with for example an NXP SmartMX2 P60 are, to date, impossible to clone unless you have access to the card for a large amount of time.
You'd also be surprised how powerful smart cards are these days. the aforementioned NXP chip has 586 KB ROM, 144 KB EEPROM and 11 KB RAM, crypto coprocessors for RSA/ECC/DES/AES, and a 32-bit CPU.
> What bothers me even more, is that if the neighbors above me decide to join an "Apple Security Sensing Program" by toggling it on, it may as well be sensing and logging my activity.
60 Ghz is heavily blocked by walls, glass and doors, even more than 5Ghz, so that's very unlikely scenario.
> that's very unlikely scenario.
Wi-Fi sensing works with 2.4 Ghz and higher.
I want my Wi-Fi to deliver me fast internet access, not track my position. Have a feeling this will be used for il-intent and monetized by future routers
+1
As many APs today are already cloud dependent I can totally see where all the sensed data will be stored and out of the owners control.
I’m skeptical there are customers really asking for this.
If there's one thing I learnt the last decade, it's to not underestimate how even the shittiest of tech, like a smart fridge or an iot juice press, will become must-haves for the consuming class. In this case, perhaps it's "find my keys", "alert me when my toddler wakes up", "metaverse body tracking", etc/whatever.
Yeah, I realized we are on a far side of the bridge when I saw how many people in the USA decided to buy their Echos. It is estimated the USA has ca. 140 housing units, and that there are 40 millions of Echos in use now. A device I would refuse to install in my house even if someone paid me a lot for it.
Customers also didn't ask for even more ads and tracking in their TV, but they did ask for cheaper devices - the result is that you'll have to shell out serious bucks for "digital signage"-style displays if you want to live in peace.
Warehouse and asset tracking and management is the number customer of this technology. On consumer router this will be just a marketing bullet points. Find your car key were you always put them but forgot.
How would this be useful? Collecting the average distance away from an access point someone uses their phone or whatever?
Similar motivations as gait recognition or accelerometer data harvesting as proxy for other human actions.
“You seem to spend a lot of time in your bathroom, would you like to try one of these laxatives from our partners?”
“Your honor, wifi data clearly shows the defendant was…”
But tracking your position allows it to give you fast internet access.
How does beamforming position granularity correlate with speed?
I don't need more than a few hundred megabits on the go, thank you very much. If I want to go faster, and Ethernet cable is always a faster solution with less moving parts.
When it comes to consumer gear, modern WiFi equipment is often faster than even Ethernet. I agree with your overall point, though.
i can tell when an ssh connection in my own apartment is going over wifi rather than the ethernet cable (if the session open before connecting the ethernet) - is it a weak signal? yes, but it's not a big apartment. With a modern router, sitting right next to it, i've never seen a connection that exceeds my gigabit ethernet.
Through all these years, ethernet always works, wifi is more often than not the culprit of connectivity issues. Moving my chromecast on to ethernet (which was one of the closest wifi devices to the router) has lead to higher quality, less stalling.
i've had my 5ghz wifi disappear because of weather radar, can't say the same for my cabled connections.
In this case you may want to use a router based on free software: https://ryf.fsf.org/categories/routers.
What are you talking about, providing you fast internet access doesn't maximize the benefit for me and my shareholders. We need your exact location, eye movement, and heart rate every second so we can do better invasive target advertisements, or sell these to other companies.
(2021) privacy comments on Wi-Fi 7 standards work for 802.11bf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.14918.pdf
> it has been shown that SENS-based classifiers can infer privacy-critical information such as keyboard typing, gesture recognition and activity tracking ... since Wi-Fi signals can penetrate hard objects and can be used without the presence of light, end-users may not even realize they are being tracked ... individuals should be provided the opportunity to opt out of SENS services – in other words, to avoid being monitored and tracked by the Wi-Fi devices around them. This would require the widespread introduction of reliable SENS algorithm for human or animal identification.
Would this require a worldwide database of biometric signatures for each human that opts out?
No, the future is decentralized. In the US, you will always be tracked because of regulatory capture of the FCC. In Europe, your phone will display a tracking consent pop-up everytime you go into a cafe. If you don't comply, you will have to get your coffee and free wifi elsewhere.
I can no longer tell apart sarcasm and real dystopia
> If you don't comply, you will have to get your coffee and free wifi elsewhere.
You will be able to take legal action against the café, but it won't make a difference.
My concern is that people opting out of this protocol won't actually be opting out of the sensing technology. Any attacker trying to sense keystrokes using RF waves already can do that and won't be hindered by some opt out program nor be considered whether or not wifi 7 sensing is allowed to be part of new routers.
Nice...
SWAT teams, home burglars and the NSA will all be clients for the data.
Once the granularity gets fine enough, movements involved in prayers, sex and elimination of waste can all be monitored remotely by state actors.
Malware from around the world will now be able to transmit details of your body movements back to their controllers.
Imagine being able to blackmail you because malware detected you having sex when your partner was away or performing Muslim prayers in an islamophobic society.
Hmm, this is what I imagined: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/07/21/books/review/0721...
Just put it under "contact tracing and covid prevention" and people will cheer you for it and ask for more.
Is it just me, or does this seems like a really, really bad idea? The privacy implications here seem… disturbing.
Technology can't be stopped by individual engineers refusing to invent it, it can only be stopped by everyone agreeing on the ways it shouldn't be used. So it was for arson (fire), homicide (every weapon since the rock), and obscene material (all communications technology), and so must it be for privacy and the various techniques of monitoring us.
Even then it isn't stopped; once something exists someone will eventually use it, and likely in way not intended by the designer.
Since 802.11bf makes most existing walls transparent, it should lead to innovation in wall construction.
It may also increase market demand for light-based wireless networking (Li-Fi) which has the advantage of being stopped by existing walls.
People will need indoor cell repeaters to undo what's done by their shielded walls.
Hopefully light-based networking gains mass-market traction.
First Li-Fi tablet was announced at CES 2022, https://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/17597/first-li...
This might be beneficial. If people get used to a mini-repeater in each room, dead spots of signal in houses and flats will go the way of the dodo.
> innovation in wall construction.
You mean like how we got ourprivacy back through innovation in web browsers?
Also we already have wifi-proof paint.
I think future home privacy will go beyond blinds. We will be lining the walls in RF blocking sheets.
RF shielding materials: https://mpkb.org/home/special/emf/protective_materials & https://www.eiwellspring.org/shielding.html
QuietRock 530RF drywall will block sound and RF, https://www.buildsite.com/pdf/pabcogypsum/QuietRock-530-Inst...
Honest question: is wrapping a home in a Faraday cage even plausible?
Or on a room level? How do you control for RF leaks? How do you handle windows and doorways?
I’m fascinated.
Room example, https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipM0GkLosTlvxisP4s4DfueX...
Windows = RF-blocking conductive mesh: copper (expensive) or nickel-copper-polyester.
It isn't just you, but it should be. The privacy implications are potentially disturbing and need to be address (I have no idea how). However there are also a lot of real uses for this that will make your life better. Some of those are things we haven't thought of yet.
What sort of real uses?
Some WiFi systems [1] [2] already offer sensing capabilities for home security.
[1]: https://www.linksys.com/us/support-article?articleNum=317804
[2]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171114005542/en/Nex...
I agree with other comments that question the ratio of benefit vs. risk. But I’m an old fogey who feels similarly about other “smart” home devices.
Also possible with open firmware on low-cost ESP32 devices, https://wrlab.github.io/Wi-ESP/ & https://github.com/StevenMHernandez/ESP32-CSI-Tool
But there's a big difference in custom firmware used in a few products and IEEE standardization in every new WiFi access point.
We need more funding for countermeasures, https://ans.unibs.it/projects/csi-murder/
> Imagine that someone wants to illegally track the position of a person inside a laboratory, for instance to measure how much time is spent doing different activities at different desks, as depicted in the upper picture. How much effective can this attack be? ... With CSI-MURDER, the localization becomes impossible because results will seem random, thus preserving the person privacy without destroying Wi-Fi communications.
400+ (!) papers on wireless sensing, over the last decade https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/ & https://groups.csail.mit.edu/netmit/sFFT/soda_paper.pdf & https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/103715
> other comments that question the ratio of benefit vs. risk
I think it is important to note that different people will have different inputs into benefits and risk. E.g. a 24 year old male living alone probably doesn't have a use case for elderly fall detection, etc. But, a 75 year old woman living alone probably does.
Also, I am of the opinion that is possible to do this properly (i.e. securely and privacy preserving). Case in point: people carry microphones (in phones) that can record any audio with them... but they do it because they trust that their phone is secure and private.
Please dance the Amazon Verification Dance.
I cannot fathom any good use for this technology.
Adaptive ventilation and maybe even heating of rooms depending on the number of people present.
You can add a 100 euro CO2 sensor to control your HVAC.
There isn't a use case for this that isn't abusive outside an industrial setting.
I think if ISPs push for these in routers we will see comeback of rewiring houses with ethernet points.
I can see ISPs forcing you to use their modem with this WiFi built in. Then even if you put it in bridge mode, the WiFi stays active while it tracks you.
If an exclusive/monopoly ISP took that approach, the modem could be surrounded by copper mesh which allows air circulation for cooling, but impedes RF.
And if everyone in the world setup TOR gateways and used TOR for everything then the survailiance and ad instry would collapse overnight.
Back in the real world it would be frightingly effective.
Buying copper mesh from shop is far more accessible to average user than setting up TOR relay.
You can find out if TOR is work8ng by typing in 'what is my IP' into google.
How do you know if your sepf made faray cage is leaking?
Are you going to get an expensive spectrum analiser? Do you know how to use it?
I can go on the street and find a random person who understands networking withing 10 minutes. I have never met a RF engineer in my life.
> How do you know if your sepf made faray cage is leaking?
Using ruler. If holes are smaller than 5mm, it will block 60Ghz.
There are far less invasive ways to do so. Like, for example, an IR sensor.
- Automatically alert emergency services to cardiac arrest - Health monitoring - intrusion detection - gesture control
In a related note, this week Google ATAP and Ford announced Ripple, a open standard for consumer radio sensing based on Project Soli (60 Ghz)
[1] https://github.com/CTA-Ripple/Ripple-v.0
[2] https://9to5google.com/2022/01/06/google-soli-radar-ripple/
That's based on UWB (Ultra Wideband), which is also present in some iPhones.
https://staceyoniot.com/two-companies-show-where-our-uwb-fut...
> Outside of fine-grained location tracking, UWB is also used for radar sensing. Google is using UWB for its Soli radar, which is embedded in the most recent Nest Hub display to track respiration during sleep ... Novelda, argues that UWB sensing is more effective than the traditional motion sensors that hotels have historically deployed because they can sense a person even when they are still by “seeing” micromovements made by the person’s breathing. Lenovo embedded the Novelda chip into its laptops as a way to keep the screen on only when a person is in front of it, which helps save on battery power.
This is great because, finally we can start selling ads with verified "proximal views" to advertisers and make more money! In fact we can think of all the wonderful product synergies here. For example, we can increase the number of proximal views by automatically locking the smart lock in their room so they can't get out for the duration of the ad. Or we can lock the doors of our smart cars while the ads are playing, that's up to 6 verified viewers all at once! We can have ad screen on toilet stalls that autoplay when someone s(h)its. Your phone can start playing ads whenever you come near it! The possibilities here are endless
This could easily fall within the realm of the Supreme Court's decision in KYLLO v. UNITED STATES where it was ruled that a thermal imaging search of a home is a violation of the US 4th amendment.
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/kyllo.h...
As we know, outlawing activities is a sure-fire way to prevent them from happening!
How much additional value does this provide vs the addition of ToF information in beacons that already exists?
This seems primarily about providing tracking capabilities to operators whereas ToF provides tracking to the people who are actually trying to do positioning. The privacy implications are worrying.
Cisco has been doing something like this with Angle of Arrival with a 16 antenna array for the past few years. It’s pretty cool but only works in perfect setups, and the antennas need to be mounted above you.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/controller/te...
Who is actually asking for this? It can't be for consumers just wanting to use the internet right? I don't get it.
It's most probably meant for opportunistic sensing in industrial environments, where it might become quite useful. It's not something you're going to use at home.
However, it could be something employers would want to use when you are working remotely. Unfortunately.
I think there’ll be a decent amount of home interest, particularly for home security. Linksys is already doing WiFi sensing as part of their various smart home products: https://www.linksys.com/us/support-article?articleNum=317804
The Linksys docs even mention how you may have to tune the sensitivity to filter out motion from your neighbors...
Since this is passive sensing, an attacker outside your home can make use of the WiFi signals emitted from the router inside your home. Or they can broadcast their own signal.
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...
Advertisement signage efficiency
Here we go
The big one is "heartbeat detection".
"Tactical suggests there are 14 heartbeats in the room"
"During the interview the candidates heart rate increased during questions on their reasons for leaving the last position"
ohhh. There is sooo much here :-)
> During the interview the candidates heart rate increased during questions on their reasons for leaving the last position
That discussion is illegal under current laws. (you cannot use a lie detector in interviews) Well at least in the US, check your local laws.
Authorities aren't restricted from using a lie detector in the US, just from using the results in court. They're frequently used to pressure suspects in criminal cases during questioning, knowing the results are inadmissable.
Gp seemed to be talking about job interviews. What cops can ask and what a potential employer can ask aren't the same.
This has nearly zero non-orwellian use-cases inside a home.
Of course there are all sorts of positive applications for the user. It's just their number is dwarfed by the real purpose of these things. We've known they've been coming for a while. Now they here and we'll have to fight it, then lose.
You have no idea what the future will come up with. There is a lot of potential on both sides.
Not mentioned in the article but a futuristic guess would be to provide omniscient eyes for AI/robots.
Short term smart bots that can navigate and clean a cluttered household with little kids and toddlers knocking about.
Longer term, maybe nanobots.
It could be Rosie from the Jetsons but more likely it’s Amazon analyzing my poop density to sell me some goofball supplements.
Terahertz-radar doorbell breathalyzer virus test decides whether to smart unlock front door to allow leaving the house?
Philip K. Dick would be proud.
There is some previous work dating back at least to 2015. They were detecting people and gestures using current WiFi technologies.
http://rfcapture.csail.mit.edu/
This could inspire some clothing designs that weave in rf blocking or distorting materials to wear in retail or work places.
That would be like hiding from cameras by wearing a bright orange reflective vest.
Will be great for making targeted interactive ads that follow customers around as they shop.
The only real practical example is fall detection, what's the real purpose of this?
Kept a lot of smart students busy
I worked briefly for a company working on WiFi sensing, and besides fall detection, nobody could give a compelling use case.
When pressed to come up with a motivating vision, the big idea was lights turning on automatically when you enter a room.
I guess? Like a lot of R&D, it seemed a solution in search of a problem.
Yeah seemed like a replacement for other motion sensing... but then how localized can this actually be?
They've been making that tech for years, every office and school classroom I've been to in the last 10 years has that now. This is just another stupid shot in the dark. Maybe someday someone will actually find a useful purpose. We are limited by what we can't even imagine so there's always hope but until then, I'll let those with deep pockets spend the energy trying to find a good use for it.
> lights turning on automatically when you enter a room
Was this really it? Or did they have some use-case not currently covered by motion sensors?
I can see some potential use for security (cheap REX sensors can be easily tricked, allowing unauthorized access into secure areas). The fix is obvious (stop cheaping out on your REX sensors) but I can envision someone trying to bill wifi sensing as the hip new solution for REX systems.
Mass surveillance. Only through warrants, of course.
Or, you know, if a cop wants to stalk their ex-gf, or an isp tech support nerd wants to stalk a customer. Or any script kiddie or petty criminal can get hold of your wifi password or drop his own AP in your house.
Nothing to see here. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
A lot of the active research in this area was military funded.
I've long had an obsession with energy savings and heating, and I think the best way to save energy on heating is by heating people instead of building. With accurate person detection in a room, you could shine low intensity IR at their exact position to keep them warm without wasting energy on heating the rest of the room.
But yeah, I think we can all expect this will be used to monitor behaviour in stores, to spy on people in homes, to rob us and to throw more "relevant" advertising in our faces.
>"you could shine low intensity IR at their exact position to keep them warm without wasting energy on heating the rest of the room."
brings new meaning to beam forming! I like it.
Check if anyone is home before a robery ?
Saving lives isn't good enough for you?
Then make a dedicated fall detector and sell it to the elderly. They already make wrist bands with panic buttons that phone for help, put the sensor in the phone hub just in case they fall and lose consciousness.
This gave me 'think of the children' gaslighting vibes.
I am sure the invisible hand of the market will make sure it's put to best possible use :)
> The only real practical example is fall detection, what's the real purpose of this?
I can think of few real world applications. Eg. I have autism and air filter. Air filter working on full power is very uncomfortable for me, but with position sensing, it can be configured to run more often when I'm not in room. Motion sensing isn't exactly a solution, because I can be very still.
Automated light management is sensible too. It can also be used to automatically turn off lights if I fall asleep.
That sounds useful in your case, thanks for sharing.
Thanks to the person who posted this comment on the article, https://staceyoniot.com/the-next-big-wi-fi-standard-is-for-s...
> Great article. To get out ahead of this, I’ll go ahead and pre-write this for the IEEE. They’re going to need it in a few months.
> “The IEEE has heard the concerns of consumers and takes privacy very seriously. We recognize that the potential value of the proposed standard is enormous, but that it must be paired with technologies that prevent it’s misuse in an ever more dangerous cyber world. As such, we are delaying the implementation of this technology in the .bf standard, and we will re-address it once we have come to a consensus across all stakeholders including privacy and consumer advocates.”</i>
I expected wifi sensing to be exploited when I saw the tech demo years ago but I did not expect it to become a standard.
(2010) early public firmware for research on Wi-Fi sensing, https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/
(2012) military use case, https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-07/seeing-thr...
(2017) industrial use case, https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/wi-fi-radiation-tran...
(2020) slide #20 on use cases for Wi-Fi 7 SENS, https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...
(2021) HN threads on "seeing through walls" radar for human monitoring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479057 & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27123493
(2021) IEEE working group, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.14918.pdf
> This paper reports ongoing efforts by the IEEE 802.11bf Task Group (TGbf), which is defining the appropriate modifications to existing Wi-Fi standards to enhance sensing capabilities through 802.11-compliant waveforms.
(2021) panel discussion on RF sensing, https://staceyoniot.com/what-you-missed-at-the-rf-sensing-ev...
> we could use terahertz spectrum to detect specific molecules and in turn use terahertz frequencies and radios as a way to track specific ingredients in food or pollutants in the air.
(2021) EU-funded CSI countermeasures research in privacy protection, https://ans.unibs.it/projects/csi-murder/
(2022) product launch ahead of the 2024 standard, https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/3/22864783/sengled-smart-hea...
> The Sengled Smart Health Monitoring Light is a dual Wi-Fi / Bluetooth bulb with built-in health monitoring using radar technology. It’s designed to track your sleep and certain biometric measurements, such as heart rate and body temperature, as well as other vital signs. The bulb can work alone, or multiple bulbs connected via a Bluetooth mesh network work together to create a virtual map that can help detect human behavior.
Your next door neighbor’s wifi will know your every movement, and can probably image it too. End of privacy within closed doors. I guess I always thought that should be sacred space.
Finally! X-Ray glasses like what the ads in the comic book promised!
Thanks, MIT! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dina_Katabi
> In 2012, her work on Sparse Fourier Transforms was chosen as one of the top 10 breakthroughs of the year by Technology Review ... In 2014, on the celebration of Project Mac's 50th anniversary, her work on X-ray vision was chosen as one of the "50 ways that MIT has transformed computer science."
I need this, room occupancy is still not a cleanly solved problem for home automation. Most methods relies on BLE or phone wifi but that sucks in many ways.
This is awesome!
This is the natural evolution of ultrasound radars, currently present in some devices.
And just what do people think 5G is for?
I've been frustratedly trying to tell people this for a few years now. Glad it's finally "coming to light".
^^^ this pun has something to do with electromagnetic radiation
Wouldn't this have to be constantly transmitting to work? I can't imagine the amount of interference this would create. The lower frequencies are already congested enough...
your access point is transmitting beacons on a regular basis anyway.
It uses reflections from existing transmissions.
I see a nice niche market opening for devices that scramble this kind of spatial detection.
Co-founders are welcome to contact me.
Do smell next.
Sounds like a coup for Cognitive
can someone who knows more than me speak to the GDPR (European privacy law) implications of a technology like this?
Meh,not even web3.0 compatible. Very disappointing.