Skype Software

Skype is a software program created by the Swedish and Danish entrepreneurs Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Skype allows users to make telephone calls over the Internet to other Skype users free of charge, or to landlines and cell phones for a fee. Additional features include instant messaging, file transfer, short message service, video conferencing and its ability to circumvent firewalls. The Skype Group, acquired by e-Bay in September 2005, has headquarters in Luxembourg, with offices in London, Tallinn, Tartu, Prague and San Jose, California. Skype experienced rapid growth in both popular usage and software development since the launch, have both it’s free and its paid services. Skype has got its own features like SkypeOut, SkypeIn, Skype Voicemail, Skype chat, Skype Me, Skype video calling, Skypecasts, Skype SMS, Skype web toolbar, Skype Zones, Skype history logs, SkypeFind, Skype Prime, Skype hardware, Invisible Calling, PocketSkype, Portable Skype. A third party paper analyzing the security and methodology of Skype was presented at Black Hat Europe 2006.It analyzed Skype and made these observations:

• Heavy use of anti debugging techniques (used to deter development of alternative clients, hacking tools)
• Significant use of obfuscated code (slows reverse engineering, less description of what program code does internal to the executable file)
• Keeps chatting on the network, even when idle (even for non-super nodes. May be used for NAT traversal)
• Blind trust in anything else speaking Skype
• Ability to build a parallel Skype network
• Lack of privacy (Skype has the keys to decrypt calls or sessions)
• Heap overflow in Skype
• Skype makes it hard to enforce a (corporate) security policy
• "No way to know if their is/will be a backdoor".

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