Comment by judge2020
4 years ago
> 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