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.