SBA @ Ekoparty 2025
SBA Research was proud to participate in the Ekoparty Security Conference 2025, held from October 22-24 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
This year, Max Günther and Philipp Frenzel represented SBA Research and the Security and Privacy Research Group at the University of Vienna with their talk Echoes of Encryption: Side-Channel Vulnerabilities in End-to-End Encrypted Messengers, presented as part of the main conference track.
© Ekoparty
About the Talk
WhatsApp isn’t just a messenger in Latin America it’s the backbone of personal life, business, and even government communication. That makes weaknesses in these platforms a national scale problem.
In this talk, they revealed a set of stealthy side-channel vulnerabilities affecting WhatsApp and Signal that continue to impact more than 3 billion users worldwide. With nothing more than a target’s phone number, attackers can leverage these flaws to track activity across all of a user’s devices.
They also demonstrated additional attack vectors, including resource exhaustion and denial-of-service techniques, proving that even small research teams can uncover critical flaws in massive systems. The session included demo videos showcasing real-world exploitation, clear graphics, and examples so that everyone from newcomers to seasoned researchers could follow along.
This talk is based on joint work by Gabriel K. Gegenhuber (University of Vienna & SBA Research) and Max Günther (University of Vienna).
About the Conference
As Latin America’s largest and most influential cybersecurity event, Ekoparty brings together researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts from around the world to exchange insights on the latest developments in information security.
Links
Research Paper:
Careless Whisper: Exploiting Silent Delivery Receipts to Monitor Users on Mobile Instant Messengers
Prekey Pogo: Investigating Security and Privacy Issues in WhatsApp’s Handshake Mechanism