Skype - A Security Risk ???

[Darth Garth]

A rather interesting technical presentation at BlackHat Europe on how Skype works and the sort of measures Skype authors used to encrypt their traffic and protect their protocol from reverse engineering.

http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf

 

[ant1b0dy]

very interesting indeed. nice post.

 

[Gatecrasher]

Very interesting.

I'm not sure Skype is a security risk, or if there is any malicious intent on the part of the programmers. Seems to me they built a secure, encrypted p2p network that could not be infiltrated (easily) by hackers.

One thing is for sure, though, don't leave Skype running in your taskbar. Whether it is alive or supposedly "inactive" it is receiving and transmitting Skype traffic non-stop. I have seen this vividly with Wall Watcher. Apart from chewing bandwidth, I have an deep distrust of any software that is busy promoting its own existence at my expense.

You wouldn't leave your p2p file sharing applications running 24/7. Don't do it with Skype.

 

[Darth Garth]

Apart from chewing bandwidth, I have an deep distrust of any software that is busy promoting its own existence at my expense.

But is that not the whole idea behind P2P and esp BitTorrent ... i.e to share alike ???.