{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/password-stealing-without-hacking-wi-fi","title":"Password-Stealing without Hacking: Wi-Fi Enabled Practical Keystroke Eavesdropping","arxiv_id":"2309.03492","date":"2023-09-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jingyang Hu","Hongbo Wang","Tianyue Zheng","Jingzhi Hu","Zhe Chen","Hongbo Jiang","Jun Luo"],"abstract":"The contact-free sensing nature of Wi-Fi has been leveraged to achieve privacy breaches, yet existing attacks relying on Wi-Fi CSI (channel state information) demand hacking Wi-Fi hardware to obtain desired CSIs. Since such hacking has proven prohibitively hard due to compact hardware, its feasibility in keeping up with fast-developing Wi-Fi technology becomes very questionable. To this end, we propose WiKI-Eve to eavesdrop keystrokes on smartphones without the need for hacking. WiKI-Eve exploits a new feature, BFI (beamforming feedback information), offered by latest Wi-Fi hardware: since BFI is transmitted from a smartphone to an AP in clear-text, it can be overheard (hence eavesdropped) by any other Wi-Fi devices switching to monitor mode. As existing keystroke inference methods offer very limited generalizability, WiKI-Eve further innovates in an adversarial learning scheme to enable its inference generalizable towards unseen scenarios. We implement WiKI-Eve and conduct extensive evaluation on it; the results demonstrate that WiKI-Eve achieves 88.9% inference accuracy for individual keystrokes and up to 65.8% top-10 accuracy for stealing passwords of mobile applications (e.g., WeChat).","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03492v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.03492v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"password-stealing-without-hacking-wi-fi","repo_url":"https://github.com/nest-fi/wiki-eve","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}