I wasn’t able to read the whole article, but the abstract implies that they’re reading the WiFi “waves” to predict key strokes. This is an extension of WiFi “person detector” technology. I’d love to see the whole article and learn if I’m afraid of this or not.
They’re using a math technique similar to how audio fingerprinting (e.g. can identify a song from someone humming it) works. Also, I could be wrong but it might actually be a clever way to use the built-in gesture recognition features of some of the newer wifi 7 chipsets (yeah, they have that).
They’re not using it to pick up audio (obviously), but the way the math works would be similar: When someone moves their hand this way, that’s a 90% match for the letter A. That sort of thing. So when you capture a series of movements, you can associate that with the person typing a specific word.
What I’d like to know is how specific this technique is to the keyboard/person in question. As in, if it was trained on the researchers/volunteers and thus only works on the researchers/volunteers.
I suspect that it’s likely got the same problem as keyboard audio fingerprinting tech: It only works if you train it ahead of time for that user on that specific keyboard.
