I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old. It seems this, like a lot of new tech these days, will end up offering little benefit while providing new malicious capabilities.
It's much worse: neither crack nor connection is required. The technology is entirely passive, it only uses reflections from Wi-Fi radios, same as radar. No connection to the router is required, hence the acronym DFWS (Device-Free Wireless Sensing).
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.
Perhaps we need a celebrity to help demo SENS transparency of their home walls, to help consumers and regulators understand the implications. That could motivate research investment in privacy controls.
More details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901979
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.
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.
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
Edit: Turns out there are other comments below mentioning this.
What do you mean? Most consumers have a wireless router, and that works for their needs.
Even if that is a concern, I don't see sensing as being a benefit.
If you don't have the expertise to run ethernet cable yourself, just find local companies that install alarms - they have lots of ways to run and hide cables; it's their job after all!
Frequently we create the tool in order to kill with it.
After that we also use to tool to create.
We're equally capable of good and evil and yes, we are frequently good, too.
Over these years I also realized how little you can do to actually stop research, no matter what your opinions of it are. Even if something is officially forbidden, you can be sure someone else works on it if it's interesting enough, so in the end you're at a disadvantage. There are many examples of it nowadays.
If you look at my comment, you can construe it as even being more negative and cynical, since I'm saying that instead of creating a tool and finding ways to kill with it, we're frequently building tools just to kill with them, and only later we find ways to use them for something non-lethal.