The Skype Protocol Was Reverse-Engineered

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 2 June 2011 at 08:43 AM EDT. 15 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
While many Linux users are upset that Microsoft's buying out Skype and that the Free Software Foundation's GNU Free Call hasn't matured much in being a reliable replacement to Skype (not all of the FSF projects move along), there is some interesting news this morning: an independent researcher has reverse-engineered the Skype protocol.

This researcher has successfully reverse-engineered many of pieces of the Skype protocol (version 1.4 of the spec) for RC4 and arithmetic compression, etc. He also has a "send message to Skype" open-source code example. Version 1.4 of the protocol is slightly out-of-date right now.

For those interested in the Skype protocol, more details are available on skype-open-source.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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