Jiska Classen (Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam), Alexander Heinrich (TU Darmstadt, Germany), Fabian Portner (TU Darmstadt, Germany), Felix Rohrbach (TU Darmstadt, Germany), Matthias Hollick (TU Darmstadt, Germany)

Apple has integrated satellite communication into their latest iPhones, enabling emergency communication, road- side assistance, location sharing with friends, iMessage, and SMS. This technology allows communication when other wireless services are unavailable. However, the use of satellites poses restrictions on bandwidth and delay, making it difficult to use modern communication protocols with their security and privacy guarantees. To overcome these challenges, Apple designed and implemented a proprietary satellite communication protocol to address these limitations. We are the first to successfully reverse-engineer this protocol and analyze its security and privacy properties. In addition, we develop a simulation-based testbed for testing emergency services without causing emergency calls. Our tests reveal protocol and infrastructure design issues. For example, compact protocol messages come at the cost of missing integrity protection and require an internet-based setup phase. We further demonstrate various restriction bypasses, such as misusing location sharing to send arbitrary text messages on old iOS versions, and sending iMessages over satellite from region-locked countries. These bypasses allow us to overcome censorship and operator control of text messaging services.

View More Papers

LLM-xApp: A Large Language Model Empowered Radio Resource Management...

Xingqi Wu (University of Michigan-Dearborn), Junaid Farooq (University of Michigan-Dearborn), Yuhui Wang (University of Michigan-Dearborn), Juntao Chen (Fordham University)

Read More

Space Cybersecurity Testbed: Fidelity Framework, Example Implementation, and Characterization

Jose Luis Castanon Remy, Caleb Chang, Ekzhin Ear, Shouhuai Xu (University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS))

Read More

GadgetMeter: Quantitatively and Accurately Gauging the Exploitability of Speculative...

Qi Ling (Purdue University), Yujun Liang (Tsinghua University), Yi Ren (Tsinghua University), Baris Kasikci (University of Washington and Google), Shuwen Deng (Tsinghua University)

Read More

Cross-Origin Web Attacks via HTTP/2 Server Push and Signed...

Pinji Chen (Tsinghua University), Jianjun Chen (Tsinghua University & Zhongguancun Laboratory), Mingming Zhang (Zhongguancun Laboratory), Qi Wang (Tsinghua University), Yiming Zhang (Tsinghua University), Mingwei Xu (Tsinghua University), Haixin Duan (Tsinghua University)

Read More