Skype Cracked?
Can Skype be reverse engineered? That has been the $2.6 billion dollar question Skype watchers often ask themselves. Alec Saunders points to this blog post by Charlie Paglee that claims that a bunch of chinese engineers have done exactly that – cracked Skype.
The hacked clients cannot act as super nodes, the said blog notes, quoting the CEO of the unnamed Chinese company. In other words, the said clients could ride the Skype network without doing any heavy lifting of their own. Virus has mutated, and the parasite has a parasite.
It is hard to vouch for the authenticity of this claim; though if they can reverse engineer stuff like Blackberry, router software and what not, this is not that outrageous a claim. We have contacted Skype PR seeking comment. That said, if the crack is true, then it could have some detrimental impact on the Skype and eBay.
Update: Skype has sent this statement, “Skype is aware of the claim made by a small group of Chinese engineers that they have reverse engineered Skype software. We have no evidence to suggest that this is true. Even if it was possible to do this, the software code would lack the feature set and reliability of Skype which is enjoyed by over 100m users today. Moreover, no amount of reverse engineering would threaten Skype’s cryptographic security or integrity.”
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Om,
This is surely less surprising than the MySpace User and Password cracker available freely.
Originally developed by Mustapha Inc (site suspended now), many people calim it works.
How do the Chinese communicate with Skype without licensing GIPS codecs?
Can Ebay’s infrastructure serve as Skype Supernodes in case Skype disables Supernodes from users’ clients?
This is what I call “Forcefully Open Source” :P
there is a lot about this story which one needs to know. i have mailed skype people asking for an explaination. on the issue of FOS- that indeed might be the case. As Alec suggests that they might be smart to open source the skype protocol.
You forget to mention the potential for blocking Skype.
I guess the main issue is to crack the encryption. If you just want to do text chat the rest is simple. They could also have reverse-engineered the codecs, even though it’s way more complex.
Skype’s seeming dominance is based on a walled garden approach, similar to iTunes/iPod. Hence I don’t see what Skype would gain from disclosing the specification.
My dd-wrt router can block outgoing Skype (both Skype Out and Skype to Skype). I think Skype blocking is easier than most of us originally thought.
Actually back in March i saw a presentation from EADS Labs that also claimed to have reverse-engineered skype. (http://florida.blogs.com/florida/2006/03/skypereversee.html). The difference -from memory- is that they used existing skype clients to set up a private network, as opposed to going the whole hog as described above.
Sorry, b0rked link:
http://florida.blogs.com/florida/2006/03/
Direct link to the EADS ppt:
http://www.secdev.org/conf/skype_BHEU06.handout.pdf