FutureWatch: As You Distort Wi-Fi Space You Become Identifiable

Wi-Fi networks could soon track you without devices, as Italian researchers harness signal distortions to create unique biometric identifiers...

Researchers in Italy have shown that even ordinary Wi-Fi signals can be used to track people, without needing them to carry any device at all.

A team from La Sapienza University of Rome has developed a system called ‘WhoFi,’ which can generate a unique biometric identifier based on how a person’s body interacts with surrounding Wi-Fi signals. WhoFi can identify people within a Wi-Fi area with an accuracy of 95.5%.

The approach, described in a preprint paper, uses signal distortions caused by the human body to re-identify individuals as they move across spaces covered by different Wi-Fi networks.

More information: Danilo Avola et al, WhoFi: Deep Person Re-Identification via Wi-Fi Channel Signal Encoding, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2507.12869