Mobile Discovery Project in the News
09/16/2020Researchers from the Technical University of Darmstadt and the University of Würzburg show that popular mobile messengers expose personal data via discovery services that allow users to find contacts based on phone numbers from their address book.
When installing a mobile messenger application like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal or any application of the like, new users can immediately start texting their preexisting contacts based on the phone numbers stored on their devices upon granting the application the required permissions.
As soon as this happens, the application gains access and may regularly upload their address book to company servers in a process called mobile contact discovery.
A recent study done by our team of researchers at Secure Software Systems Group at the University of Würzburg and the Cryptography and Privacy Engineering Group at TU Darmstadt shows that currently deployed contact discovery services severely threaten the privacy of billions of users.
Find out how this happens and what we, as mobile messenger users, can do to diminish the risks of being the victims of any privacy attacks, by reading the entire article.
Visit any of the following websites to read the full article, which is available in English, German and other languages:
English:
www.research-in-germany.org
www.nachrichten.idw-online.de
www.eurekalert.org
www.technologynetworks.com
www.helpnetsecurity.com
www.khaleejtimes.com
www.nationalheraldindia.com
www.privateinternetaccess.com
www.scitechdaily.com
www.techxplore.com
www.businessinsider.com
German:
www.handelsblatt.com
www.zeit.de
www.sueddeutsche.dewww.sueddeutsche.de
www.saarbruecker-zeitung.de
www.t-online.de
www.br.de (Nertzwelt)
www.br.de (Bayern)
www.onlinemarketing.de
www.futurezone.at
www.gmx.net
www.faz.net
www.heise.de
www.pcwelt.de
www.scinexx.de
www.web.de
www.computerwelt.at
www.inside-it.ch
www.mimikama.at
Russian:
www.cnews.ru
University Press Releases:
TU Darmstadt
Uni Würzburg
Social news websites and blogs:
www.news.ycombinator.com
www.reddit.com
The following media reports below feature our NDSS’21 paper, All the Numbers are US: Large-scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers by Christoph Hagen, Christian Weinert, Christoph Sendner, Alexandra Dmitrienko, and Thomas Schneider.
More details and a pre-print available at https://contact-discovery.github.io.
