As authors of “Adversarial WiFi Sensing” state in their conclusion:
“Our work brings up an inconvenient truth about wireless transmissions. While greatly improving our everyday life, they also unknowingly reveal information about ourselves and our actions. By designing a simple and powerful attack, we show that bad actors outside of a building can secretly track user presence and movement inside the building by just passively listening to ambient WiFi transmissions (even if they are encrypted). To defend against these attacks, we must control the volume and coverage of WiFi signals, or ask APs to obfuscate signals using cover traffic.
While our attack targets WiFi localization and tracking, our methodology can be generalized to sensing mechanisms at different RF frequencies (e.g.UHF, cellular, millimeter wave [63]) and other mediums (acoustic [32], ultrasound [47, 61], visible light, magnetics). Beyond this single attack,we hope to highlight largely overlooked privacy risks from ambient RF (and other) signals around us.”