Chapel Hill Computational Linguists Crack Skype Calls

mikejuk writes "You might think of linguistics as being interesting but not really useful. Now computational linguistics [PDF of original paper] has been used to crack Skype encryption and reconstruct what is being said in a VoIP call. What is surprising is that though they are encrypted, the frames that make up a Skype call contain clues about what phonemes are being spoken."

Comments

Side channel attack

[betterunixthanunix]

The wording in TFS is a little misleading; they did not "crack Skype encryption," they found an exploitable side channel in Skype. The crypto itself has not been cracked, but it was being used in a way that leaked lots of information.