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ATHENE researchers analyse Apple's Emergency SOS
ATHENE researchers, in collaboration with the Hasso Plattner Institute, have conducted the first comprehensive security analysis of Apple's Emergency SOS via Satellite service. Despite the multi-layered encryption architecture, the analysis revealed significant security vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to circumvent geographical restrictions and send unauthorised messages.
The research team, led by Prof Matthias Hollick of TU Darmstadt, developed a special simulation environment to analyse the protocol, identified methods to bypass location restrictions and also discovered the possibility of using the 'Find My Friends' feature to send arbitrary text messages. The researchers shared their findings with Apple, which led to concrete security improvements. They also published an open source solution on GitHub that provides a way to freely send messages from countries with internet censorship. The detailed research was presented at the prestigious Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025 in San Diego, and are documented in the paper 'Starshields for iOS: Navigating the Security Cosmos in Satellite Communications'.
More in our press release (in German)
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