The location of the smartphone can be determined by the delay in receiving SMS for Android

Northeastern and New York Universities said that their security specialists have developed a new smartphone detection system, and covertly. The accuracy of the method is not 100%, but approximately the location of the phone can be tracked.

This system works through silent SMS messages, which the victim cannot track because he does not receive notifications. Senders, on the other hand, can find out in which area they should look for an object. The development helps to interact with the target without using third—party programs, all you need is just to send an SMS.

Testing was carried out in the USA, the UAE and some European countries. A dozen telecom operators with different networks from LTE to 5G NSA. The system gradually revealed the subscribers location, first talking about the continent, then the country, city and area. We managed to achieve a result of 96% accuracy, but this is only in the USA.

Location information is found out by reading the delay in receiving a message, which is issued by the operator of the network to which the subscriber is connected. The calculation is done by a program that is already trained in calculating delays for a certain area.

There is protection against such a system. You can limit the receipt of SMS-DR on the operators side, or when switching to opaque mode in SMS HR. The latter will allow you to immediately count the receipt of a message inside the operator, which means there will be no delay.