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

MingledPie: A Cluster Mingling Approach for Mitigating Preference Profiling...

Cheng Zhang (Hunan University), Yang Xu (Hunan University), Jianghao Tan (Hunan University), Jiajie An (Hunan University), Wenqiang Jin (Hunan University)

Read More

BitShield: Defending Against Bit-Flip Attacks on DNN Executables

Yanzuo Chen (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Yuanyuan Yuan (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Zhibo Liu (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Sihang Hu (Huawei Technologies), Tianxiang Li (Huawei Technologies), Shuai Wang (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

Read More

Explanation as a Watermark: Towards Harmless and Multi-bit Model...

Shuo Shao (Zhejiang University), Yiming Li (Zhejiang University), Hongwei Yao (Zhejiang University), Yiling He (Zhejiang University), Zhan Qin (Zhejiang University), Kui Ren (Zhejiang University)

Read More

Secure IP Address Allocation at Cloud Scale

Eric Pauley (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Kyle Domico (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Blaine Hoak (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Ryan Sheatsley (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Quinn Burke (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Yohan Beugin (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Engin Kirda (Northeastern University), Patrick McDaniel (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Read More