ActListener: Imperceptible Activity Surveillance by Pervasive Wireless Infrastructures

Recent years have witnessed enormous research efforts on WiFi sensing to enable intelligent services of Internet of Things. However, due to the omni-directional broadcasting manner of WiFi signals, the activity semantic underlying the signals is leaked to adversaries for surveillance in all probability. To reveal the threat, this paper demonstrates ActListener, which could eavesdrop on user activities imperceptibly using a WiFi infrastructure in any location of user sensing area. The proposed attack requires no direct physical access to the victim user's devices and prior knowledge of activity recognition model details and device locations. In particular, ActListener first detects the signal segment induced by each human activity, and estimates the locations of legitimate devices and the victim users relative to the adversary's device for further signal modeling. Then, ActListener models propagating WiFi signals to construct the relationship between physical locations and received signals, and converts the eavesdropped signals to that by legitimate devices based on the models. Furthermore, a neural network-based generative model is designed to calibrate the converted signals for resisting noises in over-the-air WiFi signals. Experiments show ActListener achieves 88.4% average ca-similarity on recovering originally signals from eavesdropped ones, and over 90% accuracy in activity recognition.

Automated summary

This paper introduces ActListener, a method that eavesdrops on user activities using WiFi infrastructure without their knowledge. The proposed attack does not require physical access to the user's device or prior knowledge of activity recognition models and device locations. Experimental results show that ActListener achieves good performance in recovering original signals and activity recognition.