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HoneyBreath: An Ambush Tactic Against Wireless Breath Inference

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Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (MobiQuitous 2022)

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Abstract

Breathing rates can be used to verify the human presence and disclose a person’s physiological status. Many studies have demonstrated success in applying channel state information (CSI) to infer breathing rates. Due to the invisibility of radio signals, the ubiquitous deployment of wireless infrastructures, and the elimination of the line-of-sight (LOS) requirement, such wireless inference techniques can surreptitiously work and violate user privacy. However, little research has been conducted specifically in mitigating misuse of those techniques. In this paper, we discover a new type of proactive countermeasures against all existing CSI-based vital signs inference techniques. Specifically, we set up ambush locations with carefully designed wireless signals, where eavesdroppers infer a fake breathing rate specified by the transmitter. The true breathing rate is thus protected. Experimental results on software-defined radio platforms show with the proposed defenses, the eavesdropper is no longer able to infer breathing rates accurately using CSI, and would be fooled by a fake one crafted by the transmitter instead.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The study has been approved by our institution’s IRB.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and feedback. This work was supported in part by NSF under Grants No. 1948547.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, 73019, USA

    Qiuye He, Edwin Yang, Song Fang & Shangqing Zhao

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  1. Qiuye He
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  2. Edwin Yang
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  3. Song Fang
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  4. Shangqing Zhao
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Correspondence to Song Fang .

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  1. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Shangguan Longfei

  2. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Priyantha Bodhi

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He, Q., Yang, E., Fang, S., Zhao, S. (2023). HoneyBreath: An Ambush Tactic Against Wireless Breath Inference. In: Longfei, S., Bodhi, P. (eds) Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services. MobiQuitous 2022. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 492. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34776-4_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34776-4_12

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