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Passive Wi-Fi: Bringing Low Power to Wi-Fi Transmissions
- godelmachine 9y agoIs this system not susceptible to over-the-air attacks by malicious adversaries?
- oh_sigh 9y agoAnd why's it always malicious adversaries? Why can't we ever get some benevolent adversaries around here?
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y agoPeople want to defend against the latest threat. Now, what on earth is a benevolent adversary?
- tlholaday 9y agoThe Drill Instructor who, as you become more capable, increases the intensity of the challenge, is a benevolent adversary.
- jobigoud 9y agoSomeone that hacks your bank account to put more money in it?
- jobigoud 9y agoI thought of something else that is not discussed often. There is a class of actors that can do good actions with bad ulterior motives. For example in France we had a group of anti-muslim people provide free food to the homeless but the food had specifically pork in it. Or linked to a recent HN story a vegan terrorist could infect himself with that tick that renders you allergic to meat and then go donate blood for saving children.
- michaelmior 9y agoThose are really interesting examples although obviously stretching the definition of "benevolent."
- Fnoord 9y agoDo you have links to either of these stories?
- walterbell 9y agoParents and other teachers who simulate and stage adversity to develop student skills.
- ComodoHacker 9y agoLike the recent Internet Chemotherapy?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> Now, what on earth is a benevolent adversary? If you find yourself a target of one, it means you're most likely evil. (Also, in less extreme sense, I'd classify hackers as such, i.e. people exploiting systems for fun and learning, without doing any harm to anyone.)
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoPenetration Tester would seem to typify benevolent adversary. Or anyone who's role it is to test the sturdiness of a system or product etc.
- drostie 9y agoIf I'm understanding it correctly then the answer is not much more than our present system. You get low power consumption in your device by being parasitic on a high-power monochromatic antenna furnished by the local WiFi. There might be interesting attacks with other high-power antennas in the region creating pockets of destructive interference -- essentially localized denial-of-service type stuff. The other risk you're taking is something like "the operator of this antenna can induce bit flips and such in your communications," which is true, but they wouldn't know what bits they're meddling with because they have to commit to the inconsistent signal before you use it. But they can already send arbitrary local packets pretending to be you at that granularity. Certainly if we're talking about the signal source managed by the WiFi operator, there is no dispute that this doesn't empower them -- they own the router, where they already have direct control over your internet communication and what they "hear from" and "say to" you. Compared to the threat of opening your own access points with a suggestive name and just letting people connect to you, which you can also do with this range, being able to meddle with packets in a haphazard way doesn't seem very scary.
- godelmachine 9y agoResearch Paper -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17053300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17053300
- ourcat 9y agoThere's been a few links regarding WiFi backscatter use around here recently. Connecting RF-Powered Devices to the Internet : http://iotwifi.cs.washington.edu/ http://iotwifi.cs.washington.edu/ 3-D printed objects connect to WiFi without electronics : http://www.washington.edu/news/2017/12/05/in-first-3-d-printed-objects-connect-to-wifi-without-electronics/ http://www.washington.edu/news/2017/12/05/in-first-3-d-print...
- John_KZ 9y agoI also remember an article about a very low power camera performing read operations in an analog way with no onboard power. I think. I can't find the article though. Also there was https://github.com/seemoo-lab/mobisys2018_nexmon_software_defined_radio https://github.com/seemoo-lab/mobisys2018_nexmon_software_de.... If you think about it, there are a lot more things that can be done with wifi if you can arbitrarily TX/RX signals. In fact I'm getting a bit scared now.
- awelkie 9y agoYou may be thinking of this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16881946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16881946
- John_KZ 9y agoYes, this is it.
- rasz 9y agoCamera one was a borderline scam (used middle out compression), you have nothing to be scared of if all of UW research is of similar "quality".
- esrauch 9y agoCan you justify that? It doesn't seem like that was the consensus on the HN thread about it.
- simpsond 9y agoThis seems to require a near-by powered wifi device to aide in association of the passive device. For large deployments, that would require many powered units. In addition to that, there are requirements for multiple MACs, which may also lead to problems with limits in some networks. This is all clever, but it doesn't seem practical to me since the passive device depends on a near by powered device to do anything. I have worked on sensor networks with battery powered wifi devices. It's certainly tricky.
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- emilfihlman 9y ago>This seems to require a near-by powered wifi device to aide in association of the passive device. ...Yes? Gateways (routers) are there anyways. >For large deployments, that would require many powered units. As in all deployments? >In addition to that, there are requirements for multiple MACs, which may also lead to problems with limits in some networks. Wot? This is a non issue. >This is all clever, but it doesn't seem practical to me since the passive device depends on a near by powered device to do anything. I have worked on sensor networks with battery powered wifi devices. It's certainly tricky. Then you don't understand what this is about. Backscatter is awesome because you literally don't put energy into generating rf yourself.
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- ComodoHacker 9y ago>View the slides Can't we have PDF.js decode and render .pptx files? I bet they're no more complex than PDF.
- Doxin 8y agoYou're betting wrong. The office formats are horrifically complex.