A Resilient Randomization Technique Against ML-Driven Timing Side Channel Attack on Mobile Location

Abdeslam El-Yahyaoui, Mohammed Erradi

2025

Abstract

Delivery status notifications are a standard feature of mobile instant messaging applications. They inform users about the successful delivery of their sent messages. However, this common feature opens up a timing side channel attack compromising user location privacy. This attack exploits variations in Round Trip Times (RTTs) across locations, allowing the training of machine learning models for location inference. Recent work proposed a solution based on randomly delaying the RTTs (RDR) on the messenger server side using uniformly sampled perturbations between 0 and a maximum value. I this work, we have shown that the timing side channel attack still persists with significant accuracy even with the aforementioned randomly delaying RTT countermeasure. We then propose a resilient client side randomization technique involving a distribution with randomly varying parameters across RTTs (RVPR). We have shown that the suggested approach (RVPR) is resilient against this attack and has less impact on user experience than the existing RDR approach.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

El-Yahyaoui A. and Erradi M. (2025). A Resilient Randomization Technique Against ML-Driven Timing Side Channel Attack on Mobile Location. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT; ISBN 978-989-758-760-3, SciTePress, pages 61-71. DOI: 10.5220/0013457900003979

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt25,
author={Abdeslam El-Yahyaoui and Mohammed Erradi},
title={A Resilient Randomization Technique Against ML-Driven Timing Side Channel Attack on Mobile Location},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT},
year={2025},
pages={61-71},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013457900003979},
isbn={978-989-758-760-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT
TI - A Resilient Randomization Technique Against ML-Driven Timing Side Channel Attack on Mobile Location
SN - 978-989-758-760-3
AU - El-Yahyaoui A.
AU - Erradi M.
PY - 2025
SP - 61
EP - 71
DO - 10.5220/0013457900003979
PB - SciTePress