- cross-posted to:
- chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
The reason the FCC is only allowing the sale of state approved routers in the US?
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“This technology turns every router into a potential means for surveillance,” warns Julian Todt from KASTEL. “If you regularly pass by a café that operates a WiFi network, you could be identified there without noticing it and be recognized later – for example by public authorities or companies.”
Later…
Inexpensive or older routers either don’t store history at all or keep it for a short time.
Newer models can store more information for more extended periods.
https://www.thetechwire.com/how-long-does-a-router-store-history/
We used to recommend people to run the newest stuff possible, but we came to a point that maybe it’s better for us to keep with older tech for a good while
Or go to more civilized countries for vacation to get not backdoored hardware.
Do you think every country has its own router hardware manufacturer and commodity chip manufacturer? 😂
The 2 giants that make 95% of consumer routers around the world and the few companies that design the chips for them are both in heavy surveillance states.
From what I’ve just read, the tech doesn’t seem ready to identify people yet. It can supposedly detect hand gestures, but facial recognition I seriously doubt. But that’s probably just a matter of improving the tech. See this article for more info.
From OPs linked article…
In tests involving 197 participants, the researchers said the system identified individuals with nearly 100% accuracy. The recognition remained effective regardless of viewing angle or how the participants walked.
I can totally believe when it tracks a person it can tell when the same person walks by again later. But matching people with their actual identities would require a database of wifi scan data that simply doesn’t exist yet.
that’s a load bearing “yet”
that’s a trivial problem to solve. combine this with a camera for facial recognition in a public space. then you’ve got wifi signature combined with the photo/video for facial recognition. then presumably you can use the WiFi signature anywhere else, even without the camera and be able to identify people.
I was wondering about that. The article didn’t say anything about being able to identify the same person walking past a different router. And I can’t imagine the study didn’t try. So I assume it doesn’t work.
That’s connection history. CSI motion detection software storing information it collects would be entirely independent of that. How much it saves and how long it saves it would just depend on the size of the router’s memory.
Have fun watching me be balls deep in my partner, fed boys. Be jelly cause you can’t fuck like me.
I’m already envious 🙂↕️
I’m sure you fuck good or will one day if you haven’t already.
From what I’ve read this is built into the required wifi router for Xfinity. I discovered this when I signed up for Xfinity fiber, had the fiber installed and setup and then cancelled it the same day, because of this and not being able to buy and run my own hardware, and needing to install an app on my phone to manage the router, and apparently not being able to choose my DNS. They required that I rent their hardware for an additional $15/mo. Oh well, at least fiber is in the house now, if anyone wants it in the future. I sure won’t be paying them to spy on me.
Fuck Comcast, still.
app to manage router
This shit was a pain in the ass and now learning about this makes me feel even more pissed off
Damn. Put a faraday cage around the router and plug in your own router to a LAN port.
Wrap it in aluminum foil.
Whilst this sounds a lot like a foil hat joke, that’s literally the easiest way to wrap something in a conductive material cage (i.e. a faraday cage).
If you don’t want it to look ridiculous, put it inside a box whose inside has been lined with aluminum foil.
Mind you, personally I too would just cancel that shit, but the option is there to carry on using it whilst blocking its radio emissions.
FWIW I was able to use my own router when I set up with Xfinity recently
This was fiber, if that makes a difference. I asked the install guy, he called his boss, because no one had asked him that before. He told me “no, it’s not allowed”. Also, I tried plugging the patch cable directly into my own wifi router and nothing.
Also, I tried plugging the patch cable directly into my own wifi router and nothing.
The router would need to be explicitly configured to connect to your account on the network, which would require certain information provided by the ISP, which it sounds like they weren’t going to provide.
All inferred from the response I got from the tech.
That’s because Xfinity offers motion sensing as a feature, which requires this tech in the router. Presumably it’s configurable and costs extra to turn on.
It’s a “costs extra feature” for the customer. But, they have access to it regardless of whether it’s “turned on”. It’s never turned off for them. And, if that puts me in tin-foil hat territory, so be it.
Comcast is why I have starlink
It would be great if there were some open source tool kits for this. If the technology is going to exist it should be in the hands of the people.
Damn, I thought I called it 8 months ago, but that was about reading heart rates using wifi…
Yeah it’s nuts. There’s also https://www.tommysense.com/ which is planning individual presence detection and location tracking within rooms using an esp32 mesh, but that’s closed source
No cameras (total privacy)
Seems not for long…
MVP
Yeah, if this shit has to exist, at least let me use it for presence detection in Home Assistant without having to buy separate sensors or something!
It would be amazing to not have to deploy a network of esp32s to do it with Bluetooth.
Although I’m already putting one in each room.
Probably just need a protocol to work with the data, however it can be interfaced with. Is it just measuring signal strength via speed over time?
If you’re technical you might like enjoy this article that explains how the tracking works. Basically the router can perform math on the interference created by objects moving around the room. It seems like this would have to be part of the router firmware, which doesn’t sound like a standard feature. But if it is, the fix would be to install modified firmware with that function disabled. The smoking gun will be if somebody gets into DMCA trouble for doing this.
New person in room detected, please drink verification can.
that’s not a sufficient fix when you are living very close to other households
Or an open source hardware device that changes your “wifi signature” randomly.
Opensource tech to do the same thing has been in the hands of the people for a long time. This is just a different way of doing it without motion sensors.
Product idea: clothing with jaged edges and radio absorbing plates.
Stealth Bomber Jacket.
WiFi jamming underpants.
Don’t give Musk the idea of the CyberShirt.
Necessary accessory called cyberBra for that real car hood look
Funnily enough, indoors, this would probably make you more visible as the only area with no reflections. Stealth works outdoors because the sky does not have a radar return.
My understanding is that this catches disruptions between devices and router. I don’t think this would work. I would say you should instead sell a “bracelet” with “ancient Himalayan Salt” embedded into the silicone to absorb and cancel the tracking. It would probably sell a ton! Obviously wouldn’t work but $!
Well you can’t stop it from knowing something is there. But you should be able to confuse it’s identification of a specific person.
Yeah probably but if you’re going to this much trouble to spy, you’re may as well put gait analysis on it.
You can buy faraday bag cloth. It’s expensive.
Very interesting concept. I was curious about how in the hell this could be done. This article explains the general method.
When an inert object like a person moves around between the router and stationary connected devices like computers and printers, it interferes with the signal. The pattern of interference plus math can be used to plot the movement of the object - and even measure subtle changes like hand gestures. Home security software from companies like Xfinity can already use this tech to send you an alert when something is moving around in your house, without needing additional hardware. Imagine an informercial where a guy holds up a handful of “clumsy motion sensors” with wires sticking out of them, and “confusing instructions”. Not if you just let your router do it!
As far as being a new and sinister means of surveillance, evil companies could already theoretically tap into anybody’s motion sensors or security cams. The difference with WiFi tracking is that you wouldn’t necessarily know it’s there.
That’s using CSI though. The article said the researches specifically did not utilize CSI.
But regarding CSI: I evaluated that as a small part of my Master’s thesis and it worked pretty OK for motion detection but not for classifying other activities, at least not on a SISO link. For more complex stuff you would need both a MIMO access point (router) and device (e.g. phone). Also, you need to constantly transmit messages to get up-to-date CSI, which is not great for power consumption as well as cluttering the communication channel. There are some other constraints, especially regarding noise. E.g. I managed to completely destroy the CSI spectrogram by turning on a microwave oven. There is 802.11bf in development, which is supposed to standardize this, because currently using CSI is pretty much a “hack”, as it is not intended for sensing. Once this is widely adopted, I would start being worried, but not right now.
This is from my thesis:
That is extremely cool, thank you.
Wouldn’t a microwave causing significant interference also be a sign of a very faulty, potentially unsafe microwave? If it’s bathing your environment with microwaves, you’re cooking to some degree. I know a 2.4 GHz router is using microwaves too, but restricted to much lower power. I’d be very suspicious of an oven that’s leaking enough to interfere with my signals since you don’t know how strong the leaking microwaves are and they may in fact be harmful. I imagine someone standing in front of their microwave watching it operate, cooking their eyeballs as they wait.
to be fair, maybe. To pass FCC/CE regulation regarding EMC, it has to adhere to strict limits at 2.4 GHz (but I could also imagine for microwave ovens specifically that the allowed emissions are higher than for other devices, because 2.4 GHz is just the band it operates in. But idk, I didnt read the standard for those). But it does not mean that it may not radiate anything in that band.
Anyways, my observation was that it did interfere and the microwave was definitely closed. But also it was not 10m distance to the microwave, more like 2m, so relatively close. WiFi receivers are quite sensitive to be able to work with low received powers. So just a little emission is sufficient to interfere. You are probably not disturbing the communication itself, because OFDM is quite robust, but it certainly destroyed my use case (which operated on the whole CSI).
And there is definitely some stuff leaking, e.g. through radiated emissions on the wiring (the power line). But it is certainly not cooking anything. That’s also what the regulation makes sure of.
It’s not too different from what I can tell. They seem to just exploit the fact that beamforming information (BFI) is transmitted back to the access point. BFI is ultimately not so different from CSI. What they exploit is that they can just listen in and intercept the BSI without access to the AP.
The need for a constant signal to scan movement is a good point. Makes sense that nearby wifi devices can’t just be sitting there, they have to be actively transmitting to the router or there’s no signal for the target to interfere with. I must have gotten CSI and wifi scanning confused. Tbh I’m not even sure why CSI is in the article except for history, but I found the principle fascinating. In your research did you turn the intererence into anything like a heat map of a person standing in the room, or is it more of a signal fingerprint, like chromatography or spectrography?
My topic was fall detection (as in elderly people falling) specifically without using cameras or wearables. The idea was to take the CSI (basically what you see in the image) and just stuff it into some machine learning model to get a prediction as to whether someone fell in a given time frame, so I was trying to classify the signature of the falling “activity”. From my literature survey, this has been done successfully with CSI. But as with a lot of research, it typically lacked practicality. Much of my work was implementing the firmware, data recording, processing, and so on. I also had to record a ton of falls (ouch) and label them. I ended up throwing away the CSI approach though, because of the noise reasons I mentioned. That was simply a deal breaker. I went with FMCW radar instead (and it worked pretty good).
When an inert object like a person
Say waaaa?
inert meaning not a wifi device.
That’s cool and all but if true, why use an animated photo instead of a real life example?
I’m not sure what you think an “example” would look like. It’s not taking a photo of you, it’s measuring what’s distinctive about the way you personally mess up radio signals and how it differs from how other people mess them up. Internally it’s just a ton of numbers.
I assume they want to take those numbers and make a visual representation like a radar return or ultrasound image. Probably wouldn’t really look like anything but still it’d be pretty sick to impress your friends by looking at your 2nd screen filled with green matrix vertical scrolling shit and be like: “the cat wants out.”
a real life example? you mean like a photo of a person next to a router?
“Oh my goodness, this is a nightmare” typed everyone into their government approved location recording devices that can show them cats and boobs.
Gimme cat boobs.
It is easier to just give up and submit, I’ll grant you that.
Huh? No cats on mine , weird.
wearing a smartwatch that constantly outputs an identifier.
Pretty sure this is old news? It’s basically sonar, which The Dark Knight predicted in the film.
Edit: a word
Right? Im pretty sure this is a few years stale and already incorporated in some isps routers
https://www.xfinity.com/hub/smart-home/wifi-motion
https://www.originwirelessai.com/isps-can-do-more-with-wifi-sensing/
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/27/1088154/wifi-sensing-tracking-movements/
The statement from the article was the unlike previously, they used current consumer equipment, and could uniquely identify a specific person. I believe previous versions could just identify that there was “A” person. I don’t know that all that is true, but it is what the article says, and my vague memories line up.
The first time I heard about this was in 2013 and, in 2019, I had a local government management class where wifi sensing in busy downtown areas and stadiums was discussed as a plus side to municipal wifi installations. In the latter case it was described as being available not too far in the future.
Sensing is officially going to be part of 6G, might not be deployed everywhere, but it’s going to be in the standard.
Sounds like the higher frequency 6G would have better resolution (potentially sub mm?) than Wifi 7’s ~5cm. Article about 6G ISAC.
Ok now what router do I buy and what firmware do I flash to plug this into Home Assistant?
and how do you protect yourself against the neighbors devices, especially in a densely populated building
Faraday cage, it’s going to be a hassle to wiremesh your entire apartment, and you can forget using a mobile phone inside of it, but there are no outside signals getting in that way.
The question with mandating US made routers may be either to protect citizens from foreign attacks - or to make sure every US router has a router with a government-approved backdoor.
On which option would you bet?
Why not both?
Because they ignored the first issue for long enough, so it is more or less a non-issue for the US government.
Hmm. The article appears to conflate multiple things?
One of them is “viewing” the RF spectrum to build up an image. The other is reading the unencrypted beamforming data from a router. That second one depends on people carrying a WiFi-capable piece of electronics with them doesn’t it? There has to be something for the beam to focus on, some sort of beacon signal.
Although I guess all it really needs is for the person to step between the router and a device connected to the router; that should enable analysis of the disruption patterns.
I don’t think a person has to carry anything. The tracking is based on measuring the interference a moving person (or a dog) creates between the router and a connected device like a range extender or a networked printer.
Any reason this wouldn’t work with cell towers?
Yes, it wouldn’t really.
Right now the way this works is that a human body absorbs a certain about it wifi signal, so of the signal strength in a room dips and comes back up, someone walked through the room, for example. Couple this with what IPs and MAC addresses the router is connecting to, and Verizon can tell “human with laptop,” or “human watching TV.” So just “human body” or dog/cat are what it can detect. Verizon does try and sell this as a feature, as in a shit security feature.
So for cell towers, they’re too far from people in an already chaotic environment to really be useful. Trees, cars, and a million other things can throw off trying to detect already minute changes in signal density. Not to mention that the signals from cell towers are much stronger, so harder to detect the changes.
Yes, however do you remember the big fuss over 5g tower tech coming from Huawei and how that is a security issue? Well turns out the 5g towers can employ beam forming for better connection with each phone. And the interesting thing is that AESA radars work much the same - so you can imagine what a nation wide network of these towers would provide for china in terms of air traffic information
Sure, but why bother?
Practically speaking, we all carry trackers in our pockets, attached to our phone number, email and social media. We already consent to giving away all that data, which basic ping triangulation also allows for fairly granular location tracking.
The wifi tracking method is helpful because it very granular in an otherwise opaque area. It tracks based on body size, who does what around the house, who specifically watched what on TV.
There’s no need, they can use triangulation since you’re almost always near your phone
I imagine resolution decreases with range
Edit: resolution not revolution
Revolution should increase the closer you get to a billionaire.
I think the main advantage with the wifi-based approaches is that they are usually used in a relatively static/calm indoor environment with a stable channel response and your motions are disturbing that, compared to a quickly changing outdoor environment (e.g. a city) where it would be much harder to distinguish individuals. Also, you are typically closer to the access points, making the power/SNR higher. Regarding mobile communication though, the trend is towards higher frequencies and smaller cell sizes which also give greater spatial resolution (and higher power) and some funky near-field effects can be used to get beam forming on crack: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10147 So perhaps it could work even better, wouldn’t be surprised
Despite what others have said. It could in theory. But could it work with ordinary cell towers today, probably not. I base this on the accuracy of current location tracking by cell towers. They still use triangulation from my understanding, and aren’t highly accurate at that. The space your phone could be in is large enough for many people to be. So the granularity just isn’t there.
This is probably because of the large range they cover compared to the power levels they use. But in theory if the density of towers were higher, and the power levels were increased, they could probably do it in at least some locations with the perfect conditions.There is another potential issue, which is the frequency. The lower the frequency, the less it will interact with an obstacle including people.
fret not, 5G antennas are built more densely and they are using higher frequencies
How do they identify a particular person though? I get you could see people as present or not or moving around the room, but it’s insane that they would be able to tell facial features etc.
The wavelength of a 5 Ghz wifi signal (the highest frequency in common use for wifi) is a little under 6 cm. So as a crude measure, it’s not going to resolve spatial features much smaller than that with much reliability.
A paper from around a decade ago talked about using WiFi to identify key strokes so with large data models we have today I would assume they could get pretty good fidelity on a person. Maybe not enough for “beyond a reasonable doubt” but probably enough where your WiFi company is selling your data on what you do at home
Height and build alone would narrow it down significantly.
You can initiate identification post visual contact or before loss of visual contact. As long as tracking is good the identification info can be propagated
I think as a person moves about the waves would get a clearer picture.
Building codes should probably include Faraday-cage type shielding.
That would prevent cell signals from inside, making it harder to (e.g.) call the fire department, or an ambulance.
the return of landlines is nigh
Honestly, we’d be better off at this point.
That could be fixed by using WiFI calling, getting a VoIP line or installing a cell booster.
WiFi calling will make a direct beacon to follow, as any other WiFi use would. Faraday cages would block WiFi calling, as with any other signal.
I think these techniques can use the reflection of the signal from the AP’s own transmissions, no additional devices needed.
The Faraday cage will keep the WiFi signals inside the building. Nobody will be able to track you from outside and your own trusted devices will work fine inside. Just don’t bring any untrusted WiFi devices inside the Faraday cage.
I’m wondering if some types of crystal can absorb or distort the signals enough to make you harder to identify. I mean I guess you’d be “that guy with the crystals in his pocket” and would be easy to correlate to
CCTVflock, but if everyone does it it could create a layer of obscuration.Especially things with piezoelectric and/or electromagnetic effects. I’m thinking mainly along the lines of quartz, tourmaline, pyrite, tiger’s eye (hematite/jasper), shungite, etc.
It would be worth experimenting with if anyone tries that open source software another commenter linked…
You’d just need metal for this.
I guess lining hats with tinfoil is no longer solely for the paranoid…
I would not be wild about that. I use my wifi outside.
Kinda defeats the purpose of wifi
