Hacker News Reader

Comment by mathgorges | Hacker News Reader

If I recall correctly Skype was working with the NSA before it was acquired by anyone.

Microsoft changed Skype's architecture drastically, which helps making wiretapping easier. See HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4254925

Wiretapping was possible even before MS has re-engineered Skype. The main reason behind using central servers is to increase reliability and decrease power usage on mobile devices (as they do not need to serve as supernodes anymore).

The article does mention that the p2p functionality was impossible to wiretap if both parties were in a secure network. So yes, the super node made 100% of Skype vulnerable.

>Wiretapping was possible even before MS has re-engineered Skype.

Wrong. Skype was bullet proof, completely end-to-end encrypted, before the MS takeover.

Do you have a source for this?

Before Skype was acquired by Microsoft, several news articles suggested that it was possible for Skype to allow governments to monitor conversations.

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Speculation-over-...

No, by the time MS acquired them they were already wiretappable (if this is an existing English word).

This is not completely true. Even back then, certain computers running skype could become "super nodes" that handled incoming connections to devices e.g. behind NAT. All you needed to do to wiretap was become one of these nodes, which wasn't hard to do.

But yes, if you made sure neither computer had NAT and used no super nodes it was possible to be pretty protected (except for the problem that PRISM is tied to the network hardware and can read anything anywhere on the internet).

Darpa also put out a contract before the MSoft acquisition to try and break into Skype Calls properly...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com