Poster: Understanding Social Relationship Using Passive WiFi Scanning

In this work, we present an approach to extract social relationship of mobile users by passively monitoring WiFi probe requests. By analyzing the correlations of the Receive Signal Strength of packets from these low rate transmissions, we are able to discover proximity relationships and social interactions among users. We evaluate the system using commodity off-the-shelf smartphones and WiFi Access Points in a research lab. The result shows that the proposed approach is able to obtain reliable social relationships and interactions in a non-intrusive way.