SoK: Security Evaluation of Wi-Fi CSI Biometrics: Attacks, Metrics, and Open Challenges

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews Wi-Fi CSI biometrics, revealing security vulnerabilities, methodological inconsistencies, and proposing a unified evaluation framework to improve future research and security assessments.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive security-focused analysis of Wi-Fi CSI biometrics, identifying systemic issues and establishing standardized evaluation metrics and guidelines.

Findings

Existing studies rely on aggregate accuracy metrics

Security-relevant metrics like EER and FCS reveal risk concentration

Methodological choices significantly affect vulnerability assessments

Abstract

Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) has been repeatedly proposed as a biometric modality, often with reports of high accuracy and operational feasibility. However, the field lacks a consolidated understanding of its security properties, adversarial resilience, and methodological consistency. This Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) examines CSI-based biometric authentication through a security lens, analyzing how existing works diverge in sensing infrastructure, signal representations, feature pipelines, learning models, and evaluation methodologies. Our synthesis reveals systemic inconsistencies: reliance on aggregate accuracy metrics, limited reporting of FAR/FRR/EER, absence of per-user risk analysis, and scarce consideration of threat models or adversarial feasibility. To this end, we construct a unified evaluation framework to expose these issues empirically and demonstrate how security-relevant metrics such as per-class EER, Frequency Count of Scores (FCS), and the Gini Coefficient uncover risk concentration that remains hidden under traditional reporting practices. The resulting analysis highlights concrete attack surfaces--including replay, geometric mimicry, and environmental perturbation--and shows how methodological choices materially influence vulnerability profiles. Based on these findings, we articulate the security boundaries of current CSI biometrics and provide guidelines for rigorous evaluation, reproducible experimentation, and future research directions. This SoK offers the security community a structured, evidence-driven reassessment of Wi-Fi CSI biometrics and their suitability as an authentication primitive.