1. catdynamics
  2. Skype backdoor

Skype backdoor

By catdynamics on July 28, 2008.

The popular VOIP Skype has a backdoor for bugging

h/t Steve at Information Processing

A German online tech source reports that Skype has a hidden backdoor on its encryption protocol enabling third party bugging of conversations.

Info was leaked by Austrian police. Backdoor is presumably there at the request of European regulators, if not, Skype could be in serious trouble with the EU.
Backdoor is presumably shared with the US authorities, specially since they are now US owned...

Skype is very popular internationally as a quasi-free Voice-Over-Internet-Phone application.
Skype was founded in Estonia as a startup, one of the early signs of the Baltic states looking to really bloom after shaking free of the Soviet Union. They were bought out be eBay.

Skype has been very popular with Icelanders, especially those abroad, and I got the impression significant investment in Skype was made early on by Icelandic investors, making some people quite a bit of money.
I hope the NSA enjoys deciphering Icelandic street slang of lonely teenagers calling family and SOs from abroad.

Tags
Random

More like this

more on Iceland
so what happened in Iceland, where are things headed, and is it a one-off microsystem gone off the rails, or a bellwether for the developed world Iceland was a dirt poor fish+agriculture economy, under external Danish rule until 1944 when it unilaterally declared independence, the Danes being…
Weekend links: Lo! the Internetz awaketh
"Mechanical heart" Bill McConkey Collage of a digitally enhanced pencil drawing of the human heart and photographs of different brass instruments. Digital artwork. From the Wellcome Image Awards 2009 - see the other winners here. Last week was Open Access Week, which meant I got to hear a great…
Cyber Wars: liveblog
Ok, straight from cosmology to cybersecurity: the Aspen Institute is running an "Aspen Security Forum" with several days of events. Tonight General Keith Alexander, head of the NSA is doing a forum with NBC's Pete Williams. I got a ticket and got here early, as the heavens opened up and the…
"bite me"
is, loosely translated, what the leader of the opposition "red-green alliance" said to a government member of Alþing in Iceland, who claimed the opposition had been procedurally delaying the setup and start of investigation into the Icelandic banking crisis. This came during a vote of no confidence…

Proprietary software is always a backdoor risk(OSS is as well, for that matter, though the backdoors have to be subtler); but Skype is very nearly in a league of its own by the standards of allegedly legitimate software.
Some security researchers put together a look at the Skype binary and learned that the whole thing is a rat's nest of tricks, obfuscation, and antidebugging measures. With the possible exception of DRM systems(which, while hostile to the user, are considered to be legitimate because they are hostile in service of the right people), legitimate software is very rarely that cagey. Skype's network habits are similarly disconcerting, and its habit of dumping user's BIOS strings also made people nervous.

At least the whole thing is now under ebay's notoriously weak privacy policy. Definitely one to dump as soon as one possibly can.