The delivery status notification can tip off the location of WhatsApp, Signal, and Threema users.
have a vulnerability that can be exploited by cybercriminals to determine the location of a user with an accuracy of more than 80 percent.People with ill motives can carry out something called a timing attack whereby an adversary tries to infer the location of a user by measuring the time it takes for their message to get delivered. They rely on the message delivery status for this critical piece of information.
For more precise locations, an attacker can conduct this exercise multiple times and prepare a dataset to work out the location among a set of different possible places such as the victim's house, office, and gym. In fact, Signal and Threema seem more susceptible to these attacks in the sense that the timing attack can be used to infer the location of Signal users with an accuracy of 82 percent and of Threema users with an accuracy of 80 percent. For WhatsApp, this number stands at 74 percent and although that's also worrying, we would have expected the gap to be larger.How to foil the timing attack
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