In the new era of Internet of Things even your breathing rate is not private

Abstract

This thesis shows a new type of attack that can secretly gather private measurements from the target. Wi-Sneak is a stealthy reconnaissance attack which utilizes the ambient WiFi signal and ubiquitous WiFi-enabled devices without compromising any packets or WiFi networks.

We demonstrated that an adversary can accurately extract people's respiration rate by just sniffing the WiFi network and sending some fake packets no matter outside or inside the house. The deployment of this attack is simple, and anyone with a laptop, a USB WiFi-card and a Micro Controller Unit (MCU) can perform the attack by running the program introduced in this thesis. The attack is tested on various situations and the accuracy has been verified with a solid ground truth. The attack is low-cost, simple to deploy and yet very hard for unprofessional people to detect.