>Actually its from further away than that with a high gain directional antenna
The idea that the parent poster was trying to point out is that at the point the feds are within 100 ft of your house in a truck or 1000 yards but targeting your house with an antenna, they'll find a way. How secure your Wifi password is irrelevant. At that point they've probably tapped your phones.
> unless of course there is leakage of that radiation affecting someone else outside of your private property.
There always is. Radio waves don't respect walls (unless they're made of metal). If you look at the linked document, it shows strong indications that the attacks did affect wifi networks from vehicles passing by, that is, fully outside of the property.
If someone is worried that their government could be flashing the firmware of their WiFi router to use the beamforming antennae of the router to track them walking around their home....
Then they should be way more worried that their government is using any access to their wifi router at all. Like, you got way bigger things to worry about at that point, right?
There are a million surveillance side-channels that could be used to build profile-able information about what is happening inside a home from the outside. The concern isn't that those things are possible (they always will be) the concern should be that there are authorities who could be (mis)using such avenues and not explicitly being disallowed in the first place.
> Your data can be eavesdropped or modified by someone in the middle. This would be quite rare within a LAN
Literally every single public wifi network, which is a significant percentage of all internet traffic (including basically everyone working from a wework for example), is vulnerable to eavesdropping/mitm
Since this is passive sensing, an attacker outside your home can make use of the WiFi signals emitted from the router inside your home. Or they can broadcast their own signal.
> The adversary has a limited ability to monitor short-range communication channels (Bluetooth, WiFi, etc).
That seems like a pretty big assumption. From what i understand there already exists deployment of wifi hot spots to track people (both for advertising purposes and for spying purposes) to the extent that phone providers started radomizing MAC addresses.
He said "public wifi". That gave me a bit of a jolt too at first.
I wonder if there are any known instances of someone monitoring and collecting a high value target's encrypted home wifi (say a CEO before earnings, or someone at the department of labor) with the goal of cracking it.
> your home wifi threat actor is your neighbors kid playing with aircrack.
When working for an ISP it came up quite a few times that customers had extensive questions about security because they were genuinely worried about their ex-spouse spying on them. Even if they were all just "paranoid" in their specific cases (I wouldn't know), I think it's a fair concern. If all it takes is some googling and a bit of money to rent cloud GPU's, well, scorned lovers have done way more expensive and less effective things to cause damage or violate privacy.
That's a bad analogy for an unsecured wifi. Wifi is radiated energy in radio spectra. They're not looking through your window; you're shining a flashlight through your walls and they wrote down the pattern you're strobing into the street (and that pattern isn't even secret; you're using the common pattern everyone uses to send messages intended to be universally understood).
Actually its from further away than that with a high gain directional antenna (I've hit WiFi hot spots about a mile distant using same) but the point is that they can do this from outside your property. You would probably know if someone was in your house but you'd be hard pressed to notice a Yagi antenna pointed at your window from across the street or down the block a bit.
That said, I read the article more as 'yet another reason this whole compelling third parties is an issue' sorts of reasoning as opposed to this is some new threat that we didn't know about. The author points out it has been covered in lots of places. The argument is that more for the folks who aren't thinking they are affected by this because they aren't dissidents or people of interest (yet).
No, WiFi operates in the ISM band, which is by design a free-for-all where the only thing regulated is the emitted radio power. It is intentionally the radio equivalent of a public billboards where microwave ovens and iPads fight for supremacy.
In any event, the actual criminals are going to exploit it no matter what. Google should probably invoice the complainers for saving them from themselves.
But it isn't sent by government agents "in order to collect information from within", which is a key factor in the description.
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