Echoes of Fingertip: Unveiling POS Terminal Passwords Through Wi-Fi Beamforming Feedback

Recent years, point-of-sale (POS) terminals are no longer limited to wired connections, with many relying on Wi-Fi for data transmission. Although Wi-Fi offers the convenience of wireless connectivity, it introduces significant security vulnerabilities. This work presents a non-intrusive method for eavesdropping POS passwords via Wi-Fi sensing, named <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathsf {BeamThief}}$</tex-math></inline-formula>. Instead of conventional Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) readings, our approach employs Wi-Fi Beamforming Feedback Information (BFI) for an eavesdropping attack. Compared to CSI, which can only be extracted through intruding into the Access Point (AP) or from a limited selection of commercial Wi-Fi cards (e.g., Intel-5300), BFI readings can be more readily obtained from a broad array of commercial Wi-Fi devices. A key technological contribution of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathsf {BeamThief}}$</tex-math></inline-formula> is the development of an analysis model for predicting finger motion trajectories. This model is based on the physical relationship between BFI readings and finger motion, thus eliminating the need for extensive labeled training data. Furthermore, we employ Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) to enhance the BFI series, ensuring performance across various scenarios. We implement <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathsf {BeamThief}}$</tex-math></inline-formula> using everyday commercial Wi-Fi devices and conduct a series of experiments to assess the impact of this attack. Experimental results demonstrate that <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathsf {BeamThief}}$</tex-math></inline-formula> achieves an accuracy rate 79<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> in inferring 6-digit POS passwords within the top-100 attempts.