Amplifying Threats: The Role of Multi-Sender Coordination in SMS-Timing-Based Location Inference Attacks

SMS-timing-based location inference attacks leverage timing side channels to ascertain a target’s location. Prior work has primarily relied on a single-sender approach, employing only one SMS attacker from a specific location to infer the victim’s whereabouts. However, this method exhibits several drawbacks. In this research, we systematically enumerate the limitations of the single-sender approach, which prompted us to explore a multi-sender strategy. Our investigation delves into the feasibility of an attacker employing multiple SMS senders towards a victim to address these limitations and introduces novel features to bolster prediction accuracy. Through exhaustive experimentation, we demonstrate that strategically positioned multiple SMS senders significantly enhance the location-inference accuracy, achieving a 142% improvement for four distinct classes of potential victim locations. This work further highlights the need to develop mitigations against SMStiming-based location inference attacks.