PrivyWave: Privacy-Aware Wireless Sensing of Heartbeat
Yixuan Gao, Tanvir Ahmed, Zekun Chang, Thijs Roumen, Rajalakshmi Nandakumar

TL;DR
PrivyWave is a physical-layer privacy system for wireless heartbeat sensing that uses cryptographic decoy signals to enable selective access for authorized devices while protecting against unauthorized sensors.
Contribution
It introduces a novel key-based physical obfuscation method that generates decoy signals, allowing selective privacy in wireless heartbeat sensing across multiple modalities.
Findings
Unauthorized sensors have significantly higher error rates (21.3-42.0 BPM)
Authorized sensors maintain accurate measurements (5.8-9.7 BPM)
Effective privacy protection across various environments and distances
Abstract
Wireless sensing technologies can now detect heartbeats using radio frequency and acoustic signals, raising significant privacy concerns. Existing privacy solutions either protect from all sensing systems indiscriminately preventing any utility or operate post-data collection, failing to enable selective access where authorized devices can monitor while unauthorized ones cannot. We present a key-based physical obfuscation system, PrivyWave, that addresses this challenge by generating controlled decoy heartbeat signals at cryptographically-determined frequencies. Unauthorized sensors receive a mixture of real and decoy signals that are indistinguishable without the secret key, while authorized sensors use the key to filter out decoys and recover accurate measurements. Our evaluation with 13 participants demonstrates effective protection across both sensing modalities: for mmWave radar,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsNon-Invasive Vital Sign Monitoring · RFID technology advancements · Biometric Identification and Security
