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 perspective, analyzing how existing work differs across 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. We construct a unified evaluation framework to empirically expose these issues and demonstrate how security-relevant metrics, such as per-class EER, FCS, and the Gini Coefficient, uncover risk concentration that remains hidden under traditional reporting practices. Our analysis highlights concrete attack surfaces and shows how methodological choices materially influence vulnerability profiles, which include replay, geometric mimicry, and environmental perturbation. 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.
翻译:Wi-Fi信道状态信息(CSI)已被多次提出作为一种生物特征识别模态,相关研究常报告其高精度与操作可行性。然而,该领域对其安全属性、对抗鲁棒性及方法学一致性缺乏统一认识。本知识系统化(SoK)研究从安全视角审视基于CSI的生物特征认证,分析现有工作在感知基础设施、信号表示、特征流水线、学习模型及评估方法等方面的差异。我们的综合分析揭示了系统性不一致:依赖聚合精度指标、误识率/拒识率/等错误率报告有限、缺乏逐用户风险分析、以及对威胁模型或对抗可行性的考量不足。我们构建了一个统一的评估框架,通过实证揭示这些问题,并展示如逐类等错误率、FCS及基尼系数等安全相关指标如何暴露传统报告实践中隐藏的风险集中现象。我们的分析明确了具体攻击面,并证明方法学选择如何实质性地影响脆弱性特征,包括重放攻击、几何模拟及环境扰动。基于这些发现,我们阐明了当前CSI生物特征识别的安全边界,并为严格评估、可复现实验及未来研究方向提供了指导原则。本SoK为安全社区提供了对Wi-Fi CSI生物特征识别及其作为认证原语适用性的结构化、证据驱动的再评估。