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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."
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.
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?
You know what would be neater? Something not based on a proprietary system, and there are plenty. (Though it could be argued whatever things like SIP is as good.)
None of this harms Skype's existing security in any way. Encryption, if properly implemented, is secure even when all of the mechanisms are known
ROT13 isn't secure when it's known.
Like ROT13, RC4 is an antiquated cipher with many known issues; and a modified version of RC4 could be even less secure than the vanilla implementation. No-one should be using it these days when there are much better alternatives available.
The actual RC4 cipher has bad key scheduling issues. Because the initialization step doesn't mix the key bytes well enough into the S-box, the first bytes of the keystream (which is XOR'd with the plaintext to produce the ciphertext) leak lots of data about the key. This is a major problem with WEP (there are, of course, others). Cryptographers recommend discarding the beginning of the keystream because of this weakness. Nevertheless, RC4 is popular because it is byte-oriented and fast. Even 8-bit machines can implement it trivially.
Ultimately, it comes down to the key scheduling. If Skype has a better key-scheduling algorithm, it may actually improve security over standard RC4.
...for *video* calls. I use Linux, my daughter uses Apple and my son uses Windows. Skype allows high quality video chat, telephone interconnect/transfer and IP voice calls on all three platforms.
They may be proprietary and bandwith hogs, but the Skype folks certainly offer a free product with great user appeal. Maybe that's why it's so popular?