Skype Encryption (Partly) Revealed

TSHTF writes "Just weeks after Skype unveiled a public API for the service, a group of cryptographers led by Sean O'Neill have successfully reverse engineered the encryption used by the Skype protocol. Source code is available under a non-commercial license which details Skype's implementation of the RC4 cipher." The linked article cautions, however, that "initial analysis suggests that O'Neill's publication does not mean that Skype's encryption can be considered 'cracked'. Further study will be needed to determine whether key expansion and initialisation vector generation are secure."

Comments

Skype still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

It is proprietary, centralized, bloatwared, closed, and bandwidth intensive. Simply fixing one of this is not an improvement on the situation.

Unless you happen to be one of the unfortunate souls whose boss requires all communication to be on skype, then maybe a non-crashy linux client will be your savior.

Wasn't this done years ago?

[Wesley Felter]

On the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_protocol I see presentations from 2004 and 2006 about reversing Skype, including its encryption. What's new here compared to the previous work?