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Password-Stealing without Hacking: Wi-Fi Enabled Practical Keystroke Eavesdropping (2023, Arxiv)
The contact-free sensing nature of Wi-Fi has been leveraged to achieve privacy breaches, yet existing …
Pretty amazing accuracy for a eaves-droppable side-channel
5 stars
This paper explores recovering victim key-presses through a Wi-Fi data channel know as Beam-forming Feedback Information. BFI is used to help wireless APs adjust their beam-forming TX to improve performance, but BFI contains data correlated by changes in device orientation, and the attenuation from nearby movement (e.g., fingers on keyboard). By training a NN, the researchers were able to recover numeric key-presses (from a numeric keyboard) with ~88% accuracy across a variety of devices.
Pretty impressive, and shows how difficult it is to account for side-channels across all the layers of the stack when it's relatively easy to train a very sensitive ML model to extract a tiny signal from the noise.