Researchers ID Skype, BitTorrent Users

Posted by Soulskill on Friday October 21, 2011 @05:45AM from the cross-contamination dept.

itwbennett writes "Researchers have figured out a way to link online Skype users to their activity on peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent. The team was able to sift out the nodes through which Skype calls are routed and determine the user's real IP address by sniffing the packets. To correlate the identified Skype users with files shared on BitTorrent, the researchers built tools to collect BitTorrent file identifiers, a BitTorrent crawler to collect IP addresses on the network and a verifier to match an online Skype user with an online BitTorrent user (PDF). 'As soon as the BitTorrent crawler detects a matching IP address, it signals the verifier, which immediately calls the corresponding Skype user and, at the same time, initiates a handshake with the BitTorrent client,' they wrote."

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Re:Researchers? by joebok · 2011-10-21 05:59 · Score: 5, Insightful

If they were criminals, wouldn't they keep their methods secret in order to blackmail or otherwise monetize it in some way? Research like this is the only way that security gets better.
This is not research. by spicyed · 2011-10-21 06:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

All it is is data mining packets from skype nodes and comparing them to open torrent peer lists. This is not really surprising or scary to me. There are other 'researchers' who can link alot more data to you then this.