they claim to have achieved a rate of 7,000/s, which is roughly 25M/h
i do agree that is an absurd amount, especially when paired with the lack of rate limiting as discussed in their paper.
> "[...] Moreover, we did not experience any prohibitive rate-limiting. With our query rate of 7,000 phone numbers per second (and session), we could confirm 3.5 B phone numbers registered on WhatsApp [...]"
prior to my initial comment, i was under the impression they had encountered ratelimiting and bypassed it, it appears this initial assumption was incorrect.
i agree that it is ridiculous, though i faulter on calling it a vulnerability as in my eyes that term is specifically for unintended side affects / exploitation.
assuming a reasonable ratelimit, say 100 lookups per day (maybe some exceptions if the lookup results in an account that already has you in contacts, idk) - this would significantly reduce the amount of scraping that can be done.
contact lookup is a required function of whatsapp, the issue this paper highlights is that there is no protection against mass scraping
they claim to have achieved a rate of 7,000/s, which is roughly 25M/h
i do agree that is an absurd amount, especially when paired with the lack of rate limiting as discussed in their paper.
> "[...] Moreover, we did not experience any prohibitive rate-limiting. With our query rate of 7,000 phone numbers per second (and session), we could confirm 3.5 B phone numbers registered on WhatsApp [...]"
prior to my initial comment, i was under the impression they had encountered ratelimiting and bypassed it, it appears this initial assumption was incorrect.
i agree that it is ridiculous, though i faulter on calling it a vulnerability as in my eyes that term is specifically for unintended side affects / exploitation.