MotionCompass

Abstract

Wireless security cameras are integral components of security systems used by military installations, corporations, and, due to their increased affordability, many private homes. These cameras 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. In short, a user who aims to avoid surveillance can find a hidden camera by creating motion stimuli and sniffing wireless traffic for a response to that stimuli. With the motion trajectories within the motion detection zone, the exact location of the camera can be then computed. We develop an Android app to implement MotionCompass. Our extensive experiments using the developed app and 18 popular wireless security 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. This localization technique builds upon existing work that detects the existence of hidden cameras, to pinpoint their exact location and area of surveillance.