CSI-MURDER: Prevent WiFi CSI from being used to survey environment

The project claims to achieve this "without hampering the communication performance" yet reports (at the very end of the paper) of absolutely destroying quality (particularly on RX 1) even with only using single spatial stream testing and leaves this problem to "The theoretical analysis of the properties of a randomizing filter that preserve this property and also obfuscate location is part of the future work of our research teams."

I don't think it's that surprising to see you can murder CSI by murdering the communication capability CSI was supposed to add, any interesting results would seem to come from future research if ever.

Opposite to this project, I’m interested in obtaining CSI from cheap devices. But many vendors don’t expose this info (classically most papers use a very specific intel nic). Is there a cheap/popular nic, say usb based that can work with a raspberry pi, that exposes it reliably?

This paper looks really clever, and I'd like to read it. Just a thought about something that jumped off the page at me on a once-over:

> Imagine someone wants to illegally track the position (and implicitely the time spent) by someone into a laboratory [...]

The legality of analyzing WiFi frames is a bit orthogonal to this. Analyzing these packets (in my book) is fair game. It's no different than youtube-dl -- if you send me the data, you can't forbid me from saving it for personal use, or analyzing it.

If you transmit something, and don't want it to be analyzed, the data must be end-to-end encrypted. I don't like the idea of "protecting" such data with a law that says, "this data is illegal to look at".

It is interesting how this is in tension with our desire to not pollute [0]. On one hand, we want to only use as much radio/light/etc. as necessary to communicate and live our lives; on the other hand, we don't want to be easily isolated from each other simply by obviously not having any light around us.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_spectrum_pollution

Another way to prevent snooping is to prevent access to the signals. Many devices contain metal mesh shielding to absorb radio emissions [0]. For example, microwave ovens have a mesh window that passes visible light (~500 nm) but not microwave heating radiation (~100mm).

How can one insulate a building against RF leakage?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_shielding

It refers to a github repo, but that is non-existing. A murder victim?

The title is editorialized - which makes sense, since the original is only "CSI-MURDER" - but it completely mistates the content of the page.

CSI-MURDER is a way to prevent localizing people/objects with WiFi.