Indoor localization systems have become increasingly important in a wide
range of applications, including industry, security, logistics, and emergency
services. However, the growing demand for accurate localization has heightened
concerns over privacy, as many localization systems rely on active signals that
can be misused by an adversary to track users' movements or manipulate their
measurements. This paper presents PassiFi, a novel passive Wi-Fi time-based
indoor localization system that effectively balances accuracy and privacy.
PassiFi uses a passive WiFi Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) approach that
ensures users' privacy and safeguards the integrity of their measurement data
while still achieving high accuracy. The system adopts a fingerprinting
approach to address multi-path and non-line-of-sight problems and utilizes deep
neural networks to learn the complex relationship between TDoA and location.
Evaluation in a real-world testbed demonstrates PassiFi's exceptional
performance, surpassing traditional multilateration by 128%, achieving
sub-meter accuracy on par with state-of-the-art active measurement systems, all
while preserving privacy