Researchers identify people through ordinary Wi-Fi routers with 99.5% accuracy — technique works with standard Wi-Fi routers
Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have developed a technique called BFId that can identify individuals through standard Wi-Fi routers with 99.5% accuracy. This method utilizes unencrypted beamforming data from Wi-Fi devices, allowing for identification even if the person is not carrying a wireless device. The findings will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Taipei.
- ▪The BFId technique works with off-the-shelf Wi-Fi routers and does not require specialized hardware.
- ▪It achieved 99.5% accuracy in identifying individuals compared to 82.4% for previous methods using channel state information.
- ▪The researchers tested the technique on a dataset of 197 participants, the largest for Wi-Fi-based identification studies.
Tom's Hardware files mainly under tech. We currently carry 437 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Tom's Hardware |
| Canonical URL | https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/researchers-identify-people-through-ordinary-wi-fi-routers-with-99-percent-accuracy |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 10:41:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T10:47:36.622Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T10:47:36.622Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | WwCZeOXVWBGU |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Tech Industry Researchers identify people through ordinary Wi-Fi routers with 99.5% accuracy — technique works with standard Wi-Fi routers News By Luke James published 25 May 2026 The team's "BFId" attack works with off-the-shelf hardware. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: ScienceDaily.com) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Security researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany have published a paper demonstrating that unencrypted beamforming data broadcast by Wi-Fi devices during normal operation can be used to identify…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Tom's Hardware.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Tom's Hardware
