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Computer Science > Cryptography and Security

arXiv:2306.07695 (cs)
[Submitted on 13 Jun 2023]

Title:Freaky Leaky SMS: Extracting User Locations by Analyzing SMS
Timings

Authors:Evangelos Bitsikas, Theodor Schnitzler, Christina Popper,
Aanjhan Ranganathan
Download a PDF of the paper titled Freaky Leaky SMS: Extracting User
Locations by Analyzing SMS Timings, by Evangelos Bitsikas and 3 other
authors
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    Abstract: Short Message Service (SMS) remains one of the most
    popular communication channels since its introduction in 2G
    cellular networks. In this paper, we demonstrate that merely
    receiving silent SMS messages regularly opens a stealthy
    side-channel that allows other regular network users to infer the
    whereabouts of the SMS recipient. The core idea is that receiving
    an SMS inevitably generates Delivery Reports whose reception
    bestows a timing attack vector at the sender. We conducted
    experiments across various countries, operators, and devices to
    show that an attacker can deduce the location of an SMS recipient
    by analyzing timing measurements from typical receiver locations.
    Our results show that, after training an ML model, the SMS sender
    can accurately determine multiple locations of the recipient. For
    example, our model achieves up to 96% accuracy for locations
    across different countries, and 86% for two locations within
    Belgium. Due to the way cellular networks are designed, it is
    difficult to prevent Delivery Reports from being returned to the
    originator making it challenging to thwart this covert attack
    without making fundamental changes to the network architecture.

Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)
Cite as:  arXiv:2306.07695 [cs.CR]
          (or arXiv:2306.07695v1 [cs.CR] for this version)
          https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.07695
          Focus to learn more
          arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Evangelos Bitsikas [view email]
[v1] Tue, 13 Jun 2023 11:20:18 UTC (14,838 KB)
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