The Skype Protocol Was Reverse-Engineered

Posted by Michael Larabel on June 02, 2011

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 Version 1.4 of the protocol is slightly out-of-date right now.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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