German Govt. Skype Interception Trojans Revealed

James Hardine writes "Wikileaks has released documents from the German police revealing Skype interception technology. The leaks are currently creating a storm in the German press. The first document is a communication by the Ministry of Justice to the prosecutors office, about the cost splitting for Skype interception. The second document presents the offer made by Digitask, the German company secretly developing Skype interception, and holds information on pricing and license model, high-level technology descriptions and other detail. The document is of global importance because Skype is used by tens or hundreds of millions of people daily to communicate voice calls and Skype (owned by Ebay, Inc) promotes these calls as being encrypted and secure. The technology includes interception boxes, key forwarding trojans and anonymous proxies to hide police communications."

Comments

Man-in-the-middle against SSL?

[gnasher719]

Does anyone know how a man-in-the-middle attack against SSL, as mentioned in the article, is supposed to work?

The only possibility that I can see is to modify the browser itself, so that when the user tries to get a secure connection to www. criminals.com, the browser contacts www. police.de instead, gets a valid certificate from the police, while the police's computer then makes a secure connection to www. criminals.com.