Description

Detecting that an unauthorized person has entered a monitored space using the disturbance their body causes to existing wireless infrastructure. As a physical security problem this is a specialized case of motion-detection / presence-detection with policy semantics layered on top: who is allowed where, when. Note that "intrusion detection" in network-security literature refers to a different problem (NIDS/IDS) — the wireless-sensing variant is a small, distinct cluster.

Why it's hard

  • High false-positive cost — an alarm system that cries wolf gets disabled by users.
  • Zero-knowledge attacker model: the intruder may know the sensor placement and move slowly.
  • Cross-site generalization is poor for the same reasons as the rest of CSI sensing.
  • Integration with access-control systems (authorized vs intruder distinction) requires fusion with identity.

Common approaches

  • CSI variance / change-point detection with adaptive baselines.
  • Subspace-based intruder-direction estimation.
  • Combination with PIR or door-contact sensors for confirmation.

Source Papers

  • chen2023_5cbd — cross-domain WiFi sensing survey (intrusion as a target task).
  • ficara2024_f89b — privacy / RCM tutorial (security adjacent).
  • bin2008_8bb7 — NetFlow analysis (network-IDS framing for context, NOT the wireless variant).

15 vault papers address this problem

Titles and DOIs only — no abstracts, no analyses.

  • WiFi Sensing with Channel State Information 2020 DOI ↗
  • Cross-Domain WiFi Sensing with Channel State Information: A Survey 2023 DOI ↗
  • WiFi CSI-Based Device-free Multi-room Presence Detection using Conditional Recurrent Network 2021 DOI ↗
  • A CSI Dataset for Wireless Human Sensing on 80 MHz Wi-Fi Channels 2023 DOI ↗
  • On CSI and Passive Wi-Fi Radar for Opportunistic Physical Activity Recognition 2022 DOI ↗
  • MUSE-Fi: Contactless MUti-person SEnsing Exploiting Near-field Wi-Fi Channel Variation 2023 DOI ↗
  • Human Sensing by Using Radio Frequency Signals: A Survey on Occupancy and Activity Detection 2023 DOI ↗
  • A Non Intrusive Human Presence Detection Methodology Based on Channel State Information of Wi-Fi Networks 2023 DOI ↗
  • Device-Free Passive Identity Identification via WiFi Signals 2017 DOI ↗
  • A Survey on Green Wireless Sensing: Energy-Efficient Sensing via WiFi CSI and Lightweight Learning 2026 DOI ↗
  • Deep Learning-Enhanced Human Sensing with Channel State Information: A Survey 2026 DOI ↗
  • Recent Advances in mmWave-Radar-Based Sensing, Its Applications, and Machine Learning Techniques: A Review 2023 DOI ↗
  • Design and Implementation of a CSI-based System for Counting the Number of Vocational Undergraduate Students 2023 DOI ↗
  • Channel State Information from Pure Communication to Sense and Track Human Motion: A Survey 2019 DOI ↗
  • A NetFlow based flow analysis and monitoring system in enterprise networks 2008 DOI ↗