Precise Wireless Camera Localization Leveraging Traffic-Aided Spatial Analysis

Wireless cameras nowadays commonly employ motion sensors to identify that something is occurring in their fields of vision before starting to record and notifying the property owner of the activity. In this paper, we discover that the motion sensing action can disclose the location of the camera through a novel wireless camera localization technique we call
MotionCompass
. By creating motion stimuli and sniffing wireless traffic for a response to that stimuli, a user can obtain the motion trajectories within the motion detection zone and then use them to calculate the camera's location. We also extend the camera localization algorithm to pinpoint cameras in always-active mode. We develop an Android app to implement
MotionCompass
. Our extensive experiments using the developed app and 18 popular wireless cameras demonstrate that for cameras with one motion sensor,
MotionCompass
can attain a mean localization error of around 5 cm with less than 140 seconds. We also discuss defenses against
MotionCompass
. Our localization technique builds upon existing work that detects the existence of hidden cameras, to pinpoint their exact location.