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.
So it’s not actually a smartphone vulnerability as much as it is an SMS (or any other similar system with delivery receipts) vulnerability? Your old brick of a Nokia phone would have this same problem
Yes, especially since the delivery report is generated by the SMCS, not the end device.
So it’s not actually a smartphone vulnerability as much as it is an SMS vulnerbility?
It indeed is, that’s right. I changed the headline. Thanks.
I blame apple for this. They are using imessage and the green bubbles as marketing to get people to buy their hardware. So it’s either you talk to people with iPhones or you use sms.
Meanwhile Google has been trying to get apple to use RCS for years. I would be curious if RCS and iMessage are susceptible. I didn’t see anything about them when I glanced through your link.
Google’s version of RCS involves sending everything through their own servers. Apple even considering that would be a massive violation of their user’s expectation of privacy.
The carriers refused to do it one their own so Google had to provide the servers themselves. Apple could do the same, but we all know they won’t and never will. If it wasn’t this excuse it would be another one.
Apple doing their own wouldn’t result in any of the benefits people want. The open spec doesn’t support shit.
It’s not a good standard. It’s not a mediocre standard. It’s complete fucking horseshit that only works with Google’s proprietary implementation.
Apple supporting RCS would be a massive betrayal of their customers. It’s not remotely redeemable.
Oh great, so then when will apple be releasing their open standard for secure and feature rich texting?
…waits decades…
Oh yeah that’s right, doing so would prevent them from pretending that things jUsT wOrKiNg is only something an apple product is capable of because any other product is obviously garbage.
We all know the reason apple often avoids standards is purely for profit. They do it knowing it is bad for their users. So let’s not pretend that privacy is all they care about. At least google attempted a standard. And yes Google sucks ass. But I have more respect for a company that believes in standards than one whose business model only works because they strategically avoid them
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.
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.
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.
Google is evil. Apple is the good guy in this situation.
my smartphone is tracking me?! pikachugasp.exe
Haha, great…
If it’s based on the timing of replies it can be fixed in an iPhone update by simply waiting a few random seconds or minutes before firing a response.
Silent SMS are working as designed. There is a reason they are called silent.
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If I understand this correctly, isn’t this solved by randomly adding delays on the cell towers to these delivery reports? I’m not too familiar with the SMS protocol, but I can’t imagine adding a little jitter would hurt much of anything.
This is another excellent reason to never give anyone at all your cell phone number. Give them a voice number, like Google voice, Google Fi, voip.ms. The number of people have should not be the number attached to the device you walk around with.
Then if somebody wants to track you by your phone number they’ll have to go to the phone service who is not connected directly to your phone other than through the internet. And then they’ll have to track you through the internet. So it won’t be a data broker selling your location data enmass indexable by your known phone number.
This type of attack theoretically also works with signal or telegram or whatever message service that works entirely without a phone number.
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