Technology

37717 readers

427 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

162

New vulnerability in SMS messaging could expose smartphone users' location to hackers, researcher says (arxiv.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Evangelos Bitsikas, who is pursuing a PhD in cybersecurity at the Northwestern University in the US, applied a new machine-learning program to data gleaned from the SMS system of mobile devices.

Receiving an SMS inevitably generates Delivery Reports whose reception bestows a timing attack vector at the sender. Bitsikas developed an ML model enabling the SMS sender to determine the recipient's location with a 96% accuracy for locations across different countries, the researcher says in a study.

The basic idea is that a hacker would send multiple text messages to the target phone, and the timing of each automated delivery reply creates a fingerprint of the target's location. These fingerprints have ever been there but weren't a problem until Bitsikas' group used ML to develop an algorithm capable of reading them. They can be fed into the machine-learning model, which then responds with the predicted location.

According to the researcher, it doesn't matter whether or not the communication is encrypted.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think I understand the attack then. So a timing attack on Read receipts gives you approximate location how?

I understood the SMS case because the tower data could then be extrapolated. But if we're just talking about a standard internet application like signal. The read receipts are coming over the internet and not coming from Tower records.

Or at least that's my understanding. If I have a computer attached to some point on the internet. People could use ping timings to theoretically restrict the location but not very accurately right?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You just measure the time until the delivery recipe arrives. You can approximate how far away the recipient is. Now you keep doing that while changing your own location (use vpns etc.) and you can slowly get a more accurate location of the target. Now you automate that stuff and also utilize machine learning to interpret the data.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That makes sense. It wouldn't give you very accurate data. But it'll get you within a hundred kilometers or so?

Though it seems like the solution here isn't always on VPN. So the measurements would only get to your VPN endpoint. Which is trivial to know by the IP address