Who-Fi is a cutting-edge technology that levels artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and track individuals without needing any visual input. It is an experimental technology that remains to be thoroughly tested in the real world. However, based on the research paper that mentions and documents its proof of concept, it can be used to turn any order position of an individual but also identify their unique biometric signature.
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Understanding the Who-Fi technology
According to a paper published in the online preprint journal Arxiv, regular 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi signals can be used to identify and track individuals and play an important role in both identification and the technology. The technology also raises fresh concerns about digital privacy and security.
Breaking the technology down, the Who-Fi system uses a combination of a Wi-Fi signal and a transformer-based neural network (ALSO KNOWN AS A LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL). This LLM analyzes and understands something known as “Channel State Information” (CSI). It monitors the changes in Wi-Fi signal strength and phase as they bounce around a room and reflect off an individual’s body. This can be understood as the signals transmitted by radar and sonar systems.
So, whenever a human is near a Wi-Fi signal, the distortion in the signal’s natural path creates a unique pattern. This pattern is said to be as accurate as other biometric signatures of humans, such as fingerprints, facial patterns, and the structure of the retina. The Who-Fi System can recognize this signature and attribute it to individuals.
Once it has been trained on these signatures, the system can not only track the individual’s movement, but also identify them even when they re-enter the network zone after It can also capture body movement data and recognize sign language. The main advantage of the system is that it functions without any visual or auditory sensors, such as cameras and microphones.
As per the study, the entrance Wi-Fi system requires a single-ear transmitter and a three-antenna receiver, making deployment inexpensive. Coming to the efficiency of the system, the results found that despite the target being a wall, walking at a normal speed, Wi-Fi achieved 95.5 PERCENT protection.
The accuracy is said not to change even if the individual changes clothes or wears a backpack. Notably, a single system is capable of identifying and tracking up to nine individuals simultaneously.
Wi-Fi also has high evasion, meaning it is very difficult to be detected by technologies that spot surveillance technologies. This is possible as the system does not use any special hardware, and there is no special emission pattern, infrared, radar, or health spectrum light that can be detected. Additionally, Wi-Fi conducts passive radio frequency (RF) sensing, making it easy to stay hidden.
