In the news: Soon to be published, Skype back-door trojan code?
Marko Vojinovic
vvmarko at gmail.com
Sun Aug 30 10:28:58 UTC 2009
On Sunday 30 August 2009 09:20:59 Tim wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-08-29 at 14:09 -0700, Joel Gomberg wrote:
> > I thought Skype was P2P application
>
> Supposedly it is, but with closed source, you've no real idea what it's
> going to do. Even hacking software to reverse engineer it may only give
> you a partial picture, particularly if it's convoluted.
Is there any initiative or attempts to reverse engineer its protocol?
I have a feeling that the majority of Linux users would switch to Ekiga or
something else open source, if only it gave them support to communicate with
skype peers on the other end. Linux folks (myself included) use skype mainly
because all their friends and other contacts also use it, and it is completely
impossible to convince them all to go the open source way. But if Ekiga would
support the protocol, it would eliminate the need to install or use skype
binary itself, while functionality would be preserved. Not to mention better
support for sound and video hardware etc.
This would not be the first thing to reverse-engineer in the Linux world, and I
bet such a project would gain quite a lot of support from the community. I
would do it myself, if I only had the appropriate knowledge in Linux
programming... But surely *someone* does, is there any known attempt to do
this?
Best, :-)
Marko
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