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Analyzing Locality of Mobile Messaging Traffic using the MATAdOR Framework

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Passive and Active Measurement (PAM 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 9631))

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Abstract

Mobile messaging services have gained a large share in global telecommunications. Unlike conventional services like phone calls, text messages or email, they do not feature a standardized environment enabling a federated and potentially local service architecture. We present an extensive and large-scale analysis of communication patterns for four popular mobile messaging services between 28 countries and analyze the locality of communication and the resulting impact on user privacy. We show that server architectures for mobile messaging services are highly centralized in single countries. This forces messages to drastically deviate from a direct communication path, enabling hosting and transfer countries to potentially intercept and censor traffic. To conduct this work, we developed a measurement framework to analyze traffic of such mobile messaging services. It allows to carry out automated experiments with mobile messaging applications, is transparent to those applications and does not require any modifications to the applications.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.ict-openlab.eu

  2. 2.

    http://repo.xposed.info/module/biz.bokhorst.xprivacy

  3. 3.

    http://www.net.in.tum.de/pub/mobmes/dnstable.pdf

  4. 4.

    http://www.ip2location.com

  5. 5.

    http://millenniumindicators.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm

  6. 6.

    http://net.in.tum.de/pub/mobmes/

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Acknowledgments

We thank Andreas Loibl for early access to his Measurement Proxy software.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, Chair for Networking Services and Architectures, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany

    Quirin Scheitle, Matthias Wachs, Johannes Zirngibl & Georg Carle

Authors
  1. Quirin Scheitle
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  2. Matthias Wachs
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  3. Johannes Zirngibl
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  4. Georg Carle
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Quirin Scheitle .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Thomas Karagiannis

  2. FORTH-ICS, Heraklion, Greece

    Xenofontas Dimitropoulos

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Scheitle, Q., Wachs, M., Zirngibl, J., Carle, G. (2016). Analyzing Locality of Mobile Messaging Traffic using the MATAdOR Framework. In: Karagiannis, T., Dimitropoulos, X. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9631. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30505-9_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30505-9_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-30504-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-30505-9

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