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When you’re preparing for a trip, you do a few things to make it look like your home is occupied while you’re gone. Maybe put a light on a timer or ask the post office to hold your mail.
But have you ever considered recruiting a host of helpful spirits to scare off intruders by pretending to live—even breathe—in your empty home?
Thanks to Deepak Vasisht and his team, that far-fetched method will soon be an option — and for good reason.
Recent years have seen remarkable advances in remote health monitoring technology. Data on various health parameters such as breathing rate and heart rate can now be collected by a sensor installed in a user’s home.
These sensors work like dolphin sonar: they emit radio signals that are reflected off a person’s body and then modulated slightly by human contact and returned to the sensor, providing information about each person’s physiological state. The sensors can easily “see” users even through walls, and there’s no need for users to wear cumbersome devices or remember to record health data.
In short, these sensors offer great benefits, but they also have a dark side: What if someone else were to place such a device outside your home to spy on you? While the sensors are intended for things like monitoring sleep quality, an unintended consequence is that they can easily tell if anyone is home, and indeed, how many people are home, and whether they’re awake. Hence, there is a need to prevent misuse of these tools.
“That’s where we come in,” said Vasisht, an Illinois computer science professor.
To thwart fraudulent use of health sensors, Vasisht and his team—students Jayant “Jay” Shenoy, Zhikun Liu, and Bill Tao, and Zachary Kabelak of a startup called Hedron—took inspiration from some web browser privacy solutions.
“Google and Facebook, all these companies track every click you make,” says Vasisht. “And what some privacy solutions do is inject fake clicks. [trackers] You are confused about what your real options are. So that’s what we’re doing here: we’re bringing people into the environment who seem true to the technology, but they’re not.
Realizing “fake people” might seem like a tall order, but Vasisht and his team have found a way to make them look real. The trick involves complicated math, but the basic idea is simple: by installing a reflective device around your home, you can accurately mimic the human body’s signals. When the reflector bounces back the malicious sensor’s signal, it adjusts that signal to accommodate the desired number of people. In addition, it can work with such complexity that it provides realistic-looking physiological data on behalf of absent residents, such as breathing, and makes them appear to be moving around the house.
Vasisht said, “If someone tries to follow you in your house, they will not only see you, but a group of ghosts who are indistinguishable from humans.
Vasisht and his colleagues are eager to commercialize a technology they call RF-Protect. However, they have not decided what form it should take at the moment.
A paper outlining the technical details of RF-Protect, led by Vasisht students Shenoy, Liu and Tao, will be presented on August 25 at ACM SIGCOMM, the flagship annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications.
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