I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old. It seems this, like a lot of new tech these days, will end up offering little benefit while providing new malicious capabilities.
It's very scary shit. We could soon have no privacy at all in our own homes because of other people's WiFi networks. If the output is strong enough, all you have to do is connect to/crack someone's WiFi and use it to get a layout of all their neighbor's places.
> all you have to do is connect to/crack someone's WiFi and use it to get a layout of all their neighbor's places.
It's much worse: neither crack nor connection is required. The technology is entirely passive, it only uses reflections from Wi-Fi radios, same as radar. No connection to the router is required, hence the acronym DFWS (Device-Free Wireless Sensing).
To be clear, this can be done today with $20 ESP32 WiFi devices + custom firmware, i.e. any motivated attacker can already see through the walls of homes and businesses. The Wi-Fi 7 Sensing draft standard is proposing to make this available to everyone.
Perhaps we need a celebrity to help demo SENS transparency of their home walls, to help consumers and regulators understand the implications. That could motivate research investment in privacy controls.
> The Wi-Fi 7 Sensing draft standard is proposing to make this available to everyone.
As your sentence before this says, it already is available to everyone. The only thing wifi 7 opens up is someone with less technical know-how being able to flash openwrt and install some program that extracts and/or visualizes the sensing data, but $20 ESP32's isn't much of a cost to someone looking to use radio wave sensing maliciously right now.
> To be clear, this can be done today with $20 ESP32 WiFi devices + custom firmware, i.e. any motivated attacker can already see through the walls of homes and businesses. The Wi-Fi 7 Sensing draft standard is proposing to make this available to everyone.
It's like you could make a magic flashlight that sees though walls, vs. flipping a switch that turns every wall to glass. It's not a perfect metaphor, sure, but the point is that it's kind of a big step to flip that switch, throw open those floodgates, and to do it with so little fanfare.
> throw open those floodgates, and to do it with so little fanfare.
Exactly. After 10 years of research and hundreds of published papers, there is a huge gap to be bridged with consumers, regulators and lawyers, before dramatically changing the definition of "fitness for purpose" in wireless networking, https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/#external
This is a great example of why people don’t have privacy. Ethernet cables exist, and wholly forgo these problems. But, they are less convenient. Consumers complain a lot about privacy, but do little to really demand it. Of course manufacturers deserve much of the blame here for actually implementing these things, but it doesn’t seem as if consumers are trying to steer them in the right direction at all.
One thing I see 802.1bf ( Sensing ), along with 802.11be ( WiFi 7 ) could be used together in setting up consumer mesh WiFi Network. Home Wireless Networking is still pretty much an unsolved problem for average consumers.
Edit: Turns out there are other comments below mentioning this.
If you live in anything other than an apartment, your wifi connection drops considerably once a few walls and a floor are in the way. Mesh networks solve this by repeating the signal halfway to your hard-to-reach devices, although it must be done in an intelligent way if you want seamless band switching and its performance might be greatly improved with wifi 7's sensing capabilities.
My router is in the basement. Reception is great throughout the house, including the second floor, and even decent out in the garage or on the deck. Similar setup and results for my in-laws who have a massive house (3000-3500 sqft).
Many houses and places of business have walls or floors made with thicker material that block/hinder the waves - things like solid wood floors, brick walls or concrete walls can do a number on even 2.4ghz signals.
Yup - and wiring up a second access point for the upper floors gets rid of all the issues with mesh networks, especially ones from vendors that don't provide dedicated radios to mesh over.
If you don't have the expertise to run ethernet cable yourself, just find local companies that install alarms - they have lots of ways to run and hide cables; it's their job after all!
I'd say it's both ways: inventions perceived as positive at first were later used for nefarious things and the technology used to create military technologies found many civilian applications that turned out very beneficial to the society at large.
Over these years I also realized how little you can do to actually stop research, no matter what your opinions of it are. Even if something is officially forbidden, you can be sure someone else works on it if it's interesting enough, so in the end you're at a disadvantage. There are many examples of it nowadays.
If you look at my comment, you can construe it as even being more negative and cynical, since I'm saying that instead of creating a tool and finding ways to kill with it, we're frequently building tools just to kill with them, and only later we find ways to use them for something non-lethal.
There is a difference between consumer benefits and maybe industrial benefits. Maybe it might make communication between sorting bots more accurate and quicker.
