David Noel Breuer, M.Sc.

Consumer Privacy / Researcher

Contact Information

Pankratiusstr. 2
64289 Darmstadt
S2|20 220
dbreuer@seemoo.tu-darmstadt.de

Biography

David Breuer is a PhD candidate at TU Darmstadt's Secure Mobile Networking Lab. He received his B.Sc. in Civil Engineering (2017) and M.Sc. in Computer Science (2022) from TU Darmstadt. During his master's studies, he studied for one semester at the Tampere University in Pori, Finland. His research interests include consumer privacy, algorithmic transparency, and auditing large online platforms in terms of systemic risks.

Teaching

(Since 2023) Coordination and teaching assistant of our seminars and labs.
(Since 2023) Supervision of selected seminar and lab topics.
(Since 2022) Supervision of several Bachelor's and Master's Theses.

Talks & Posters

[Poster] We found advertisement transparency defects on Google Play and Apple's App Store with our on-smartphone platform analysis methodology. ECAT Research Workshop 2025, Seville, Spain, 12.11.2025.
[Talk] We looked at 4 million ads so you don't have to: Insights from investigating Apple's and Google's app store advertisement transparency. 2nd ISMK Mobile Security Conference 2025, Stralsund, Germany, 18.09.2025. Joined talk with Lucas Becker.
[Talk] Rolling the D11: An Emulation Game for the Whole BCM43 Family. WiNTECH '23, Madrid, Spain, 02.10.2023.

Offered Theses Topics

Type

Year

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2025 In progress

Automated Privacy Analysis of the Android API

Supervisor: David Noel Breuer Lucas Becker

Android is the world's most used mobile operating system with many different versions, modified by Google, smartphone manufacturers, and the open source community. This results in countless Android versions on different smartphones. Each of these versions incorporates potential differences in its API, resulting in information that could be used for fingerprinting. In this Master's Thesis, you develop an automated solution to enumerate the Android API and analyze the outcome concerning its potential privacy leakage and fingerprintability. Prerequisites: Familiarity with android internals No fear of the unknown & scientific curiosity ;)

2025 Completed (August 2025)

Investigating Music Streaming Providers with Regard to Privacy

Supervisor: David Noel Breuer

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2025 In progress

Serious Gaming for Privacy

Supervisor: David Noel Breuer

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2025 Completed (June 2025)

Network Traffic Analysis to Detect Permission Circumvention of iOS Apps

Supervisor: David Noel Breuer

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2025 Completed (May 2025)

Surveillance or Service? Examining Privacy Issues in Grocery Retailer Applications

Supervisor: David Noel Breuer Lucas Becker

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2025 Completed (March 2025)

Detecting Device Fingerprinting in Android Applications via API Hooking and Machine Learning Analysis

Supervisor: David Noel Breuer Lucas Becker

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2025 Completed (March 2025)

Reverse Engineering the Apple Device Trust Score

Supervisor: David Noel Breuer

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2023 Completed

Continuous Fuzzing Integration Into State of the Art Development Processes for Improved Software Security

Supervisor: David Noel Breuer

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2022 Completed

Reverse Engineering and Emulating Broadcom's WiFi Real-Time Core Peripherals

Supervisor: Jakob Link David Noel Breuer

Broadcom/Cypress WiFi chips commonly hold a microprocessor, also called D11 core, that handles all real-time related 802.11 MAC tasks in form of a programmable state machine (PSM). It is directly connected to the chip's PHY components as well as its non-real-time related parts. Successful attacks on the D11 core would therefore pose a high risk on the whole device. Especially, as the chip is constantly exposed over its wireless interface. Although the D11 core's architecture and instruction set are mostly proprietary, disassembling and assembling of microcodes (D11's firmware) is possible due to previous reverse engineering efforts. This in turn allows analyzing, modifying and on-chip debugging of microcodes. However, the current related processes are error-prone and time consuming. To improve those tasks, a basic emulator that can interpret the proprietary instruction set and perform corresponding calculations and memory/register accesses was designed and implemented in prior work. But, in order to properly run microcodes on the emulator, several peripherals (e.g. timers, crypto engine, tx/rx engines, PHY interface, ...) that directly influence the PSM's flow need to be emulated additionally. In this thesis, we want to analyze peripherals that are directly connected to the D11 core and simulate their behavior to the existing emulator. C and Assembly skills are recommended, as well as experience and/or interest on reverse engineering, IEEE 802.11 MAC, and low-level programming.

Publications

Type

Year

Show awards only

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2023 17th ACM Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation & Characterization (WiNTECH '23) Conference

Rolling the D11: An Emulation Game for the Whole BCM43 Family

Jakob Link David Breuer Francesco Gringoli Matthias Hollick

BibTeX DOI: 10.1145/3615453.3616520

Abstract

The D11 is Broadcom's proprietary IEEE 802.11 MAC implementation and an essential part of their WiFi chips. It is a microcontroller that orchestrates the Physical Layer and Radio Front-end implementation and is programmable through a custom microcode. We provide a new emulation framework for the D11 microcode and a corresponding firmware patch for the WiFi chip that enables essential debugging methods, including microcode breakpoints and D11 state extraction. This toolset allows researchers to analyze the D11 microcode in a controlled environment dynamically. To facilitate research on the D11, we provide an overview of state-of-the-art knowledge of the chip and publish all presented tools to the open-source community. We encourage everyone interested to enter the game, roll the D11, and provide new insights on Broadcom's MAC implementation.