Skype protocol cracked for real?

[Alexander Turcic]

The Skype protocol has been successfully reverse-engineered by a bunch of Chinese computer wizzes. Of course, this is complete unsubstantiated speculation, but it certainly isn't out of the realm of possibility. A guy claims that his Chinese friend has called him through Skype except that he wasn't using the original Skype client to initiate the call.

Today I received a call through Skype from a friend at a company in China, except he told me he was not using Skype to call me. His company has successfully reverse engineered the Skype protocol and he wanted to call me in the United States to see how it worked between physically distant IP addresses. We talked for a little over nine minutes before the call dropped. Then I called him back using my Skype and we spoke for another three minutes.

It doesn't require to be a genius to forecast the wrath of Skype company. The Skype network protocol is known to contain various methods of obfuscations (e.g. data is encrypted with RC4). Binaries of the official Skype clients are encrypted and contain various antidebugging and checksum tricks. In other words, until know, Skype preferred to keep its business in a total blackbox. Sure, the company may start to counterattack annoying hackers by preventing rogue clients from connecting to their networks. But do you recall Yahoo! when they tried to ban third parties from their Yahoo IM network? They failed miserably. And so will Skype.