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Skype Is Working To Defeat the Reverse Engineering

Posted by Soulskill on from the good-luck-with-your-time-machine dept.

ndogg writes "Michael Larabel of Phoronix was emailed a response to the reverse engineering of the Skype protocol from the VP of Skype's PR company, who said that the reverse engineering was done for the use of spam/phishing, and that it's an infringement of their IP, and that they are working to defeat it."

4 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Skype on Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps if Skype's Linux client had been better maintained and offered a feature parity to the Windows and Mac OS X clients, there wouldn't be people spending time on reverse-engineering the protocol so that they could write their own client.

    Or, maybe, there are just a lot of Linux users who hate proprietary software, and don't trust Skype. Skype uses a lot of anti-debugging techniques. What are they hiding?

    1. Re:Skype on Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The Civilian Assistance to Law Enforcement Act mandates that all telecommunications service providers install and maintain back doors into their systems for the express purpose of enabling Federal law enforcement to intercept private communications. If you want your phone calls to be "off the record" you have to use VOIP and encrypt your traffic. If a closed source proprietary VOIP provider offers encryption, they are directly obstructing law enforcement agencies in the execution of their lawfully authorized surveillance activities. There is no question that Skype has been requested to provide back doors into their "secure" proprietary protocol - unless of course it has always been trivial snake oil crypto, always a strong probability with closed source commercial products.

      Of course, the parent poster already knows all the answers, and we are lucky that he took a moment away from licking the boots of his beloved owners to favor us with words of wisdom.

    2. Re:Skype on Linux by AliasMarlowe · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Maybe they're not hiding anything, maybe they're just trying to protect their proprietary software. After all, they are a business just trying to make money.

      They've been hiding their protocols. These are not protected by patent (which would involve publishing them, assuming they were patentable). Their implementation is probably protected by copyright, but a competing implementation is unlikely to infringe that copyright, unless it is a "slavish" copy. There does not seem to be a trademark issue in play. Conclusion: it looks like they are merely trying to protect a trade secret which has been uncovered by reverse engineering. Note that reverse engineering to uncover secret methods is entirely legitimate.

      So yes, Skype is trying to preserve its revenue stream, which is secured only by secrecy of the protocols used by the proprietary Skype software. These protocols have now been made rather less secret, and apparently by legally acceptable means. So let's all say to Skype: "good luck with that".

      --
      Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
  2. Spam/phishing is just an excuse by MtHuurne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If a spammer or phisher would reverse engineer a protocol, it's very unlikely they would publish about it, since that would help their competition. It is possible that spammers or phishers will use the results of reverse engineering of course, but if your protection against malicious activities consists of a secret protocol then you should consider implementing real security instead of blaming the reverse engineering.

    In any case it's clear that Skype doesn't want third party clients to interoperate with their own, so instead of getting into a cat and mouse game it would be more useful to improve existing open source VOIP clients so Skype can be replaced altogether.