Beamforming Feedback as a Novel Attack Surface for Wi-Fi Physical-Layer Security
Jingzhe Zhang, Yitong Shen, Ning Wang, Yili Ren

TL;DR
This paper introduces BFIAttack, a new method exploiting beamforming feedback to reconstruct CSI and compromise Wi-Fi physical-layer security, demonstrating high success rates in various scenarios.
Contribution
The work presents a novel attack exploiting beamforming feedback to reconstruct CSI, revealing vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi physical-layer security mechanisms.
Findings
Achieves 73% success rate with five attempts in multi-antenna scenarios.
Achieves over 93% success rate with a single attempt in single-antenna scenarios.
Reveals critical security vulnerabilities in existing Wi-Fi CSI-based protections.
Abstract
With the rapid evolution of wireless technologies, Wi-Fi has expanded beyond its original role in data transmission to support various emerging applications, particularly in physical-layer security, including device authentication, user authentication, and secret key generation. Despite extensive research on Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI)-based physical-layer security, its vulnerabilities remain largely unexplored. In this work, we propose BFIAttack, a novel attack that exploits Beamforming Feedback Information (BFI) to reconstruct the CSI of a legitimate user or device, thereby compromising Wi-Fi-based physical-layer security. We realize the attack by leveraging a closed-form CSI reconstruction method for the single-antenna station scenario and a maximum likelihood estimation-based CSI reconstruction for the multi-antenna station scenario. Moreover, we exploit spatial…
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