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Chapel Hill Computational Linguists Crack Skype Calls

Posted by timothy on from the hookt-on-fon-iks-indeed dept.

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."

2 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Fsck You, Slashdot by theshibboleth · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "You might think of linguistics as being interesting but not really useful" Way to go Slashdot, insult one of the most important fields in existence. Do the editors and readers really not realize how closely comp ling is related to AI? I have confidence that eventually computational linguistics will crack speech/language in general and lead to computers that can learn languages as readily as human infants. This will be momentous because it would allow communication between computers and humans. Now it wouldn't solve the consciousness problem, but it would be a step in the right direction.

  2. Re:Side channel attack by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There's a reason that SSH has inserted random padding into its packets since its inception. You would think that the folks at Skype might've done just a a bit more research...