Re: In the news: Soon to be published, Skype back-door trojan code?

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On Sat, 2009-08-29 at 14:09 -0700, Joel Gomberg wrote:
> I thought Skype was P2P application

Supposedly it is, but with closed source, you've no real idea what it's
going to do.  Even hacking software to reverse engineer it may only give
you a partial picture, particularly if it's convoluted.

The understood nature of Skype is that it spreads itself across a
network in a group peers-to-peers technique (as used by many filesharing
systems), where they co-ordinate other peers amongst themselves, but the
end-to-end communication between two peers directly communicating with
each other (i.e. a phone call) will be direct peer-to-peer, where
possible, but perhaps not when its not possible (e.g. when firewalls get
in the way of making direct connections).

The gestalt behaviour does lend itself to all sorts of snooping, without
having to plant trojans on individuals.  All that's needed is for enough
spy machines to be on-line within the network, and for them to act as
the bigger nodes in the network, and they can keep tabs on what's going
on around them.

Moral of the story; don't conduct illegal business over it, don't
conduct legal but confidential conversations over it; and if you're in
one of those places where criticising the government has nasty
repercussions, I wouldn't do that over it, either.

-- 
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.



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