Wi-Fi shadows cast by your fingers could leak your password
Researchers in a team from Shanghai, Boston and Tampa recently published an temptingly titled paper about password stealing.
Dubbed When CSI Meets Public Wi-Fi: Inferring Your Mobile Phone Password via Wi-Fi Signals, the paper makes you think of Crime Scene Investigation, but that’s just a handy collision of acronyms.
This CSI is short for “channel state information,” a collection of readings that describes what’s happening at the lowest level of the data link between a Wi-Fi sender, such as your laptop, and a receiver, such as as an access point. If you remember the cassette tapes on which early home computer programs were stored, you’ll know that there wasn’t much CSI going on: there were typically two sound frequencies, 1200Hz and 2400Hz, and the pitch of the recording warbled between them every few milliseconds to denote zeros and ones.
