IS-WARS: Intelligent and Stealthy Adversarial Attack to Wi-Fi-based Human Activity Recognition Systems

The non-intrusive human activity recognition has been envisioned as a key enabler for many emerging applications requiring interactions between humans and computing systems. To accurately recognize different human behaviors, ubiquitous wireless signals are widely adopted, e.g., Wi-Fi signals, whose Channel State Information can precisely reflect human movements. Unfortunately, nearly all Wi-Fi-based recognition systems assume a clean wireless environment, i.e., no interference will compromise the developed algorithms, which, apparently, is not feasible in practice. Even worse, for systems using Wi-Fi 2.4GHz signals, the widely existing interference from coexisting protocols, such as ZigBee, Bluetooth, and LTE-Unlicensed, can easily compromise the recognition process, posing a hard limit on further enhancing the accuracy. Therefore, this work uncovers a new wireless adversarial attack against Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition systems, by intentionally injecting interference using coexisting protocol signals. The contaminated Wi-Fi signal will distort CSI estimation and finally output a false recognition result. Different from traditional jamming attacks, this new adversarial attack is intelligent and stealthy in terms of avoiding being detected from traffic analysis. Along with both theoretical analysis and extensive real-world experiments, we have shown this newly-identified attack can easily compromise many existing Wi-Fi-based human recognition systems while still bypassing malicious signal detection schemes.