All the Ways Your Wi-Fi Router Can Spy on You

theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/wi-fi-surveillance/497132/

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It can even be trained to read your lips.

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City dwellers spend nearly every moment of every day awash in Wi-Fi signals. Homes, streets, businesses, and
office buildings are constantly blasting wireless signals every which way for the benefit of nearby phones,
tablets, laptops, wearables, and other connected paraphernalia.
When those devices connect to a router, they send requests for informationa weather forecast, the latest
sports scores, a news articleand, in turn, receive that data, all over the air. As it communicates with the
devices, the router is also gathering information about how its signals are traveling through the air, and whether
theyre being disrupted by obstacles or interference. With that data, the router can make small adjustments to
communicate more reliably with the devices its connected to.
But it can also be used to monitor humansand in surprisingly detailed ways.
As people move through a space with a Wi-Fi signal, their bodies affect it, absorbing some waves and reflecting
others in various directions. By analyzing the exact ways that a Wi-Fi signal is altered when a human moves
through it, researchers can see what someone writes with their finger in the air, identify a particular person by
the way that they walk, and even read a persons lips with startling accuracyin some cases even if a router
isnt in the same room as the person performing the actions.

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Several recent experiments have focused on using Wi-Fi signals to identify people, either based on their body
shape or the specific way they tend to move. Earlier this month, a group of computer-science researchers at
Northwestern Polytechnical University in China posted a paper to an online archive of scientific research,
detailing a system that can accurately identify humans as they walk through a door nine times out of ten.
The system must first be trained: It has to learn individuals body shapes so that it can identify them later. After
memorizing body shapes, the system, which the researchers named FreeSense, watches for people walking
across its line of sight. If its told that the next passerby will be one of two people, the system can correctly
identify which it is 95 percent of the time. If its choosing between six people, it identifies the right one 89 percent
of the time.
The researchers proposed using their technology in a smart-home setting: If the router senses one persons
entry into a room, it could communicate with other connected deviceslights, appliances, window shadesto
customize the room to that persons preferences.
FreeSense mirrored another Wi-Fi-based identification system that a group of researchers from Australia and the
UK presented at a conference earlier this year. Their system, Wi-Fi ID, focused on gait as a way to identify
people from among a small group. It achieved 93 percent accuracy when choosing among two people, and 77
percent when choosing from among six. Eventually, the researchers wrote, the system could become accurate
enough that it could sound an alarm if an unrecognized intruder entered.
Something in the way? No problem. A pair of MIT researchers wrote in 2013 that they could use a router to
detect the number of humans in a room and identify some basic arm gestures, even through a wall. They could
tell how many people were in a room from behind a solid wooden door, a 6-inch hollow wall supported by steel
beams, or an 8-inch concrete walland detect messages drawn in the air from a distance of five meters (but still
in another room) with 100 percent accuracy.
(Using more precise sensors, the same MIT researchers went on to develop systems that can distinguish
between different people standing behind walls, and remotely monitor breathing and heart rates with 99 percent
accuracy. President Obama got a glimpse of the latter technology during last years White House Demo Day in
the form of Emerald, a device geared towards elderly people that can detect physical activity and falls
throughout an entire home. The device even tries to predict falls before they happen by monitoring a persons
movement patterns.)
Beyond human identification and general gesture recognition, Wi-Fi signals can be used to discern even the
slightest of movements with extreme precision.
A system called WiKey presented at a conference last year could tell what keys a user was pressing on a
keyboard by monitoring minute finger movements. Once trained, WiKey could recognize a sentence as it was
typed with 93.5 percent accuracyall using nothing but a commercially available router and some custom code
created by the researchers.
And a group of researchers led by a Berkeley Ph.D. student presented technology at a 2014 conference that
could hear what people were saying by analyzing the distortions and reflections in Wi-Fi signals created by
their moving mouths. The system could determine which words from a list of lip-readable vocabulary were being
said with 91 percent accuracy when one person was speaking, and 74 percent accuracy when three people
were speaking at the same time.
Many researchers presented their Wi-Fi sensing technology as a way to preserve privacy while still capturing
important data. Instead of using cameras to monitor a spacerecording and preserving everything that happens
in detaila router-based system could detect movements or actions without intruding too much, they said.
I asked the lead researcher behind WiKey, Kamran Ali, whether his technology could be used to secretly steal
sensitive data. Ali said the system only works in controlled environments, and with rigorous training. So, it is not
a big privacy concern for now, no worries there, wrote Ali, a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University, in an
email.

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But as Wi-Fi vision evolves, it may become more adaptable and need less training. And if a hacker is able to
gain access to a router and install a WiKey-like software packageor trick a user into connecting to a malicious
routerhe or she can try to eavesdrop on whats being typed nearby without the user ever knowing.
Since all of these ideas piggyback on one of the most ubiquitous wireless signals, theyre ripe for wide
distribution once theyre refined, without the need for any new or expensive equipment. Routers could soon keep
kids and older adults safe, log daily activities, or make a smart home run more smoothlybut, if invaded by a
malicious hacker, they could also be turned into incredibly sophisticated hubs for monitoring and surveillance.
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