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An Analysis of the Skype Protocol
zib writes "Ever felt a need to peek under the hood of your Skype client? This paper (PDF) explains all the details. Among other issues, it focuses on the NAT capabilities of Skype and audio compression."
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I believe the NAT traversal is done by routing via super-nodes which are not behind a NAT or firewall. Is this a valid assumption for the future? In other words, what if every host is behind a NAT or firewall -- it seems that way, given the increased security conciousness of hardware and software makers, that sometime in the near future, firewalling will be the norm and default, not the exception?
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
I don't like the idea of somebody setting up a high-bandwidth machine and routing enough packets to get the entire phone call I'm making and then in their spare time decrypting my phone call.
Well, I can't read the paper, because I don't have a pdf reader available, but I think they've done the crypto-stuff good enough, so that it's almost impossible to decrypt.
What is the point of decrypting something if it takes >100.000 years?
Free Mac Mini
a troll a day keeps the insanity away.. ?
I do think your wrong about it being tripe and useless. Skype will will succeed, and be around for quite a while.
Simply because it is so damn easy to use, It has clients for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and all you need is the ID of anyone you want to call. No screwing around.
I ain't no fan boy, but after using SIP and Skype, I know which the majority of users are going to find easier to use.
Also check out http://www.ilbcfreeware.org/ for the codec.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
The problem is that QoS-aware protocols are not universally deployed, so you can't count on them. Additionally most of the router-based QoS protocols suck. Adding "smarts" to the network infrastructure goes against the original Internet design principles, which dicatated that the network should be as dumb as possible and add the smarts to the end hosts.
Did anyone else notice that their test machines were 200 Mhz Pentiums running Windows 2000.
I bet they couldn't only see 5kbytes of traffic because that's all those poor machines could pump out!
I use Skype all the time to practice and learn foreign languages, and to collaborate with people located in different regions of the world. I would definately say there are many educational applications for Skype, and banning this software from a network is most probably due to a lack of understanding.