Theodor Schnitzler (Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security, TU Dortmund, and Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

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.

Speaker’s Biography

Theodor Schnitzler is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security at TU Dortmund University in Germany. He obtained a PhD in Information Security from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany in 2022. His research focuses on privacy aspects in online communication environments from both technical and user perspectives.

View More Papers

Towards Automatic and Precise Heap Layout Manipulation for General-Purpose...

Runhao Li (National University of Defense Technology), Bin Zhang (National University of Defense Technology), Jiongyi Chen (National University of Defense Technology), Wenfeng Lin (National University of Defense Technology), Chao Feng (National University of Defense Technology), Chaojing Tang (National University of Defense Technology)

Read More

Investigating User Behaviour Towards Fake News on Social Media...

Yasmeen Abdrabou (University of the Bundeswehr Munich), Elisaveta Karypidou (LMU Munich), Florian Alt (University of the Bundeswehr Munich), Mariam Hassib (University of the Bundeswehr Munich)

Read More

Navigating Murky Waters: Automated Browser Feature Testing for Uncovering...

Mir Masood Ali (University of Illinois Chicago), Binoy Chitale (Stony Brook University), Mohammad Ghasemisharif (University of Illinois Chicago), Chris Kanich (University of Illinois Chicago), Nick Nikiforakis (Stony Brook University), Jason Polakis (University of Illinois Chicago)

Read More

Detecting Unknown Encrypted Malicious Traffic in Real Time via...

Chuanpu Fu (Tsinghua University), Qi Li (Tsinghua University), Ke Xu (Tsinghua University)

Read More