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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]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not sure what point you think you're making.

The RCS people have experience with is no more open than iMessage. It's not even sort of better at anything.

Supporting RCS is not acceptable. It's a massive privacy issue.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Google attempted an open standard, carriers refused. Apple actively refuses to participate or help. Not sure why so many apple simps can't ever acknowledge that standards are important. It's likely if you look around you at any given moment, you'll dozens of vital everyday products that are cheap or possible due to standards. The rest of computing is built heavily on standards. Standards === modern society. Yet apple can do no wrong if they explicitly dodge standards for profit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, Google did not. They want control.

Apple supporting any standard Google has significant weight in forming is an inexcusable "fuck you" to every one of their customers. This isn't defending Apple because they're Apple. It's "I would be completely apeshit at Apple if they did anything as fucking disgusting as supporting Google's fucking trash protocol."

It's fucking terrible. I'm fine with an actual formal standard Google has an identical (much less than half) stake to Apple with. It's literally impossible for anything else to be forgivable under any circumstance.

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

You're ignoring the part where Google tried and carriers and apple refused.. That's not some irrelevant detail

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

Because it's not even sort of based reality.

Google never at any point had any interest in not having control.

Google fronting a "standard", by itself, makes it unacceptable. Everything they touch they hijack to take data that isn't theirs.

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

Again, point me to apple's attempts to implement or help create a texting standard. Unless you'd like to instead say that standards are not an extremely important part of human society. Because unless you believe that, their actions are indefensible and that's a separate issue from how fucked up Google is.

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

A standard controlled by Google is many times worse than a standard not existing.

An actual acceptable standard must come from an impartial third party. Apple should absolutely not be proposing one either.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'll take this as an upfront admission that apple is not only opposed to standards but actively avoidant of them when it is profitable, rather than the deflection it was meant to be.

You seem knowledgeable enough to know that standards are usually contributed to by corporations and that this has many many times not ruined them. The whole web is built on this fact. But unfortunately your zealotry blinds you to what your priorities ought to be, standards for everyone's benefit.