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Humans Can Be Tracked With Unique 'Fingerprint' Based On How Their Bodies Block Wi-Fi Signals


Researchers from La Sapienza University in Rome have developed "WhoFi," a system that uses the way a person's body distorts Wi-Fi signals to re-identify them across different locations -- even if they're not carrying a phone. By training a deep neural network on these subtle signal distortions, the ...

The Register reports:"The core insight is that as a Wi-Fi signal propagates through an environment, its waveform is altered by the presence and physical characteristics of objects and people along its path," the authors state in their paper. The Rome-based researchers who proposed WhoFi claim their technique makes accurate matches on the public NTU-Fi dataset up to 95.5 percent of the time when the deep neural network uses the transformer encoding architecture. "The encouraging results achieved confirm the viability of Wi-Fi signals as a robust and privacy-preserving biometric modality, and position this study as a meaningful step forward in the development of signal-based Re-ID systems," the authors say.

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