European Crackdown On Skype "Loophole"

angry tapir writes "Suspicious phone conversations on Skype could be targeted for tapping as part of a pan-European crackdown on what law authorities believe is a massive technical loophole in current wiretapping laws, allowing criminals to communicate without fear of being overheard by the police. Eurojust, a European Union agency responsible for coordinating judicial investigations across different jurisdictions, has announced the opening of an investigation involving all 27 countries of the European Union."

Comments

"Allowing Criminals"

[Spazztastic]

Or allowing law abiding citizens to speak with their relatives in hostile countries without worry of big brother listening.

Re:"Allowing Criminals"

[TheRaven64]

And what sensible criminal would use Skype anyway? If you care about potential eavesdroppers, you don't use proprietary encryption, and especially not proprietary encryption over a proprietary protocol that has been shown to be insecure (see the Black Hat paper).

If you want security, run SIP over SRTP, with clients that have undergone third-party security audits.

Re:"Allowing Criminals"

[Anonymous Coward]

All of them. If I have multiple older male siblings, I can address them all as "Big brother." The existence of one does not preclude the existence of others.

Re:"Allowing Criminals"

[morgan_greywolf]

You're kidding right? IF terrorists can learn to fly a jumbo jet, which, mind you, is a very complex beast that requires a lot of training, simulator, and real-world flying time to be able to fly one, or if they can become munitions experts, what's to stop terrorists from becoming IT experts?

Nothing. Nothing at all. Terrorists can take the same classes you took, take the same training you took, and learn as much about IT as you did.

Anyone determined enough to kill a bunch of people in order to achieve notoriety for their cause can learn just about anything if they think it will help them achieve their gol.

Re:"Allowing Criminals"

[tjstork]

It's worse than that, they're hostile countries looking to harm our children

Well, they are. When the head of Iran says that he's going to get the bomb and the USA is as the Great Satan, do you suppose he's just joking around?

Too many loopholes

[mangu]

Suppose they have a way to intercept Skype calls and decrypt everything. How will they know a conversation like "Aunt Emma's cat had seven kittens, three black and four white" actually means "I'm sending seven kilos of heroin, Giuseppe will take three and Giovanni four"?

Re:Too many loopholes

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an issue which applies to any form of intercepted communication not just skype

Re:Too many loopholes

[JasterBobaMereel]

Arbitary codes like this and One time pads have been proven (when done correctly) to be absolutely secure, whereas all encryption in theory is insecure (the only exception is quantum encryption)

Skype is a well known protocol, with a know encryption system, and is not secure ....

Re:Too many loopholes

[Asic Eng]

As much as I'm a privacy advocate ... Fact is most criminals are not particularly clever - often they make mind-numbimgly stupid mistakes. One of the tasks which the police has to solve, is to process the stupid criminals quickly, so that they have resources left for the more intelligent ones. Besides, in theory you can avoid any one mistake, but in practice it's impossible to avoid all of them.

So suppose the police intercept the conversation example you used. What does it tell them? Well - first they are going to find out that neither of the people involved actually has an aunt emma, or indeed any aunt who owns cats. Alternatively they might be aware that the people involved don't exchange a lot of private information, hence are not close enough to care about the cat of some relative. So they know it's a code and from that they know that something is going to happen. The recipient is a suspected drug dealer, the sender a suspected supplier, so they guess that it's about a drug deal. Possible action: keep a close watch on the recipient of the message - he may receive the drugs soon, or he may establish contact with the persons receiving the drugs.

Even if they can't guess the first thing about the content of the message - intercepting it can still yield information. E.g. it could tell them that the recipient is online now - using the IP address they could identify his location - or they could obtain a voice sample which could be used for identification. They could use the time someone calls to identify their daily routine - if suddenly a call is made at an unusual time (e.g. 2 am for someone who usually sleeps early) then they can guess that something interesting is going on.

Taken to the extreme opposite - if intercepting communications between criminals would never yield results, then wire tapping in all forms would have to be stopped. We could determine whether that's the case by analyzing criminal cases - is wire tapping evidence never introduced, is wire-tapping information never used to guide investigations? If that's not the case, then we shouldn't expect a zero return for skype-interception either.

Only Skype?

[tedrlord]

Somebody better tell them about all the other evil loopholes that criminals can use to talk over the internet. They'd better also be able to wiretap Yahoo and Windows Messenger voice, oh, and X-Box chat, and we're going to have to change the RTP protocol to send them a copy of all communications, of course. I'm guessing we'll have to hack all ssh clients to unencrypt VoIP traffic if somebody tries to tunnel it, too.

Or, you know, just get on Skype's case because authorities apparently have no idea what they're doing and seem to believe that Skype is the only way to talk over the internet. I'm sure the criminals appreciate the heads up so they can make sure to use more secure methods.

I don't WORRY about so-called criminals

[TheGratefulNet]

I do worry about my (and everyone's) government.

the governments are ruining our lives, NOT the terrorists OR the criminals!

what an upside down world we live in. I truly don't fear criminals. I truly do fear my own government.

what is a criminal going to do with info he taps from my line? otoh, we can clearly imagine the kind of damage that happens when the governments listen in.

I wonder if we can ever fix this broken world of ours, where we have more to fear from the so-called good guys than the bad guys.

Re:I'm glad we standardized on Skype

[jimicus]

If the defacto standard was opensource, with provably well implemented encryption, then I wouldn't be safe from the criminal hordes.

It could have been. If an opensource project created a product which worked as well as skype I'm sure it could easily have been as popular.

The problem with a plain SIP client is you suddenly find you need a SIP account with a provider - there aren't many truly international SIP providers and they don't all have agreements to allow SIP calls to be carried for free, which adds a lot of complication. And every layer of complication you add to a product will put a lot of people off.