Measuring Messengers: Analyzing Infrastructures and Message Timings to Extract User Locations in Instant Messengers

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Presented at NDSS Symposium 2023 by

Theodor Schnitzler

Mobile instant messengers such as WhatsApp use delivery status notifications in order to inform users if a sent message has successfully reached its destination. We have shown that this standard feature opens up a timing side channel with unexpected consequences for user location privacy. Our results demonstrate that, after a training phase, a messenger user can distinguish different locations of the message receiver by measuring and analyzing the time it takes to deliver messages. This talk will cover the set of experiments conducted during the project, from original ideas, some of which could not be followed, to the final measurement and evaluation setup we used to produce the results published in the paper.