Microsoft May Add Eavesdropping To Skype

An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a Microsoft patent application that reaches back to December 2009 and describes 'recording agents' to legally intercept VoIP phone calls. The 'Legal Intercept' patent application is one of Microsoft's more elaborate and detailed patent papers, which is comprehensive enough to make you think twice about the use of VoIP audio and video communications. The document provides Microsoft's idea about the nature, positioning and feature set of recording agents that silently record the communication between two or more parties."

Comments

GNU VoIP

[Anonymous Coward]

It's coming soon...

Re:GNU VoIP

[Hatta]

What ever happened to PGPfone? That's what we need a GNU equivalent for.

Re:GNU VoIP

[Kamiza Ikioi]

Give RedPhone a try. Best of all, it's written for Android, aka encrypted calls via a real phone. For added security, route it via Orbot (Tor).

This is why it matters that we can legally root our phones.

Wow ....

[gstoddart]

So, when they install tools for our government to spy on us, it's supposed to be a good thing.

And when they do it to help other governments we don't agree with, it's an enemy to democracy and helping to undermine the ability of peaceful protest.

Love the double standard inherent in this. Maybe we can use the stuff the US is working on to stealthily deploy an internet in places to get around 'oppressive regimes' to prevent wholesale, un-tracked monitoring of our communications.

Oh, right, if you call yourselves the good guys, it's all OK. But, make no mistake about it ... this will help the 'Bad Guys' as much as it will help the 'Good Guys' ... China wants to listen to your VOIP too.

Thank the patent office!

[the_raptor]

Now only Microsoft products will be able to have this feature! Other developers can just tell the police that adding intercept technology to their VOIP product would be a patent violation.

And it *also* implements intercept

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

So yes, it implements intercept. Obviously. Just try to sell a VOIP PBX to an operator without intercept.

I would be amazed if skype didn't implement intercept yet.

Re:And it *also* implements intercept

[GameboyRMH]

I would be amazed if skype didn't implement intercept yet.

This. Anyone who assumed in the first place that a service accessed with a closed-source app with a secret encryption scheme going through a bunch of servers you don't control was secure is an idiot.

Time to switch to Zfone

[Beautyon]

Zfone is a new secure VoIP phone software product which lets you make encrypted phone calls over the Internet. Its principal designer is Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP, the most widely used email encryption software in the world. Zfone uses a new protocol called ZRTP, which has a better architecture than the other approaches to secure VoIP.

* Doesn't depend on signaling protocols, PKI, or any servers at all. Key negotiations are purely peer-to-peer through the media stream
* Interoperates with any SIP/RTP phone, auto-detects if encryption is supported by other endpoint
* Available as a "plugin" for existing soft VoIP clients, effectively converting them into secure phones
* Available as an SDK for developers to integrate into their VoIP applications
* IETF has published the protocol spec as RFC 6189, and source code is published

[...]

http://zfoneproject.com/

Re:Next step, eavesdropping in the audio path

[Dwedit]

Yes, let's encrypt some audio before running it through Lossy Compression, and hope that we can get some recognizable signal afterwards.

Re:Think Twice?

[gstoddart]

This is really is one of those situations that if you aren't doing anything illegal don't worry about it and if you do worry about it find another tool.

This is the most damaging and poorly thought out sentiments that I hear of late ...

If you're not doing anything wrong, don't worry, citizen. Only the guilty need privacy. Only criminals use encryption. Upstanding people don't have secrets. We have to know everything to prevent thought crimes. We know what's best. Fuck that.

Deciding that we have no expectation of privacy is a dumb idea. Deciding that only people who are doing something shady try to guard their privacy is completely wrong-headed. You start out with fourth amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. In theory, there is supposed to be warrants and judicial oversight to keep this in check. Lately, the trend has been to side-step all of that stuff.

There are lots of legitimate reasons why someone would expect to keep some things private ... and taking those away under is a horrible idea.

Why is everybody so damned willing to live in a surveillance society? This makes no friggin' sense to me whatsoever. And every time I hear someone saying that if I'm not a criminal I shouldn't expect privacy I just want to scream at the sheer madness of that statement.

you can't encrypt it before.

[goombah99]

The problem with audio stream encryption is that it will be before the compression codec. When you feed uncompressed but encrypted audio into the skype codec expecting voice it either wont' be able to compress it enough to send, or very bad things will happen to the signal and it probably can't be decrypted. If you try compressing it first, then you are still screwed when you try to decrypt it.

In the 80's when CB radio took off people tried building encryptors for that but it pissed the feds off and they got shut down.

Re:you can't encrypt it before.

[GameboyRMH]

Or instead of adding this Rube Goldberg contraption on top of Skype, just use any free and open VoIP protocol that already supports encryption. There are plenty to choose from.

Article and post is FUD

[harves]

In other news, Microsoft may:
  * add image processing [to Skype]
  * add remote document scanning [to Skype]
  * add virtual machine technology [to Skype]
  * add clustering capabilities for seriously big high definition video technology [to Skype]

I'm quite sure Microsoft has patents on all the above, but none are alarming enough to mention. This article is FUD. Absolutely no link has been drawn between the Skype product and this patent, except that Skype does voice transmissions and this patent is for a system that intercepts them.

Also, I believe Skype uses a peer-to-peer method for communicating between nodes, which would make it hard to apply this patent to Skype anyway. The peer-to-peer nature of Skype is why the last big outage took quite a while to resolve. They couldn't just "reboot their servers"; updated software had been deployed to the nodes (ie. you) and was malfunctioning.

Re:Sure, but how will Microsoft abuse it?

[sqlrob]

I think it's debatable whether or not the law protects them.

Does the EULA grant the authority?