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Lots of chatter in the blogosphere these past few days with the news that Chinese programmers have managed to reverse engineer the Skype protocol.

Charlie Paglee at VoipWiki.com seems to be the first off the block with this one with his post revealing how a business contact in China had contacted him on a beta version of the software.

Charlie explains it better than I can in the post thus:

“Right now every computer with Skype installed on it can be used as a relay to carry data between two other computers when both of those computers are only allowed to make outgoing TCP calls. This means that very soon Skype users will have an alternative client which will not hijack their computer. This could eventually have a very negative effect on the Skype network if too many people choose not to act as Skype Super Nodes and the network starts to deteriorate.”

In laymans terms this means that users could access the Skype VOIP network without using the Skype client, calls could be made through third party software directly to and from Skype users. Users would also not have the resource drain that often comes with running Skype.

This will certainly be raising eyebrows at Ebay who paid $2.6bn for the Internet telephony company last September. Though in a Skype PR statement published on TechCrunch the company dont seem unduly concerned.

“Skype is aware of the claim made by a small group of Chinese engineers that they have reverse engineered Skype software. We have no evidence to suggest that this is true. Even if it was possible to do this, the software code would lack the feature set and reliability of Skype which is enjoyed by over 100m users today. Moreover, no amount of reverse engineering would threaten Skype’s cryptographic security or integrity”

Skype’s software lets PC users talk to each other for free and make cut-price calls to mobiles and landlines.
Related Reading

Skypes Been Cracked? (Engadget.com) July 16th
Skype Cracked? (GigaOm.com) July 13th
Skype Protocol Has Been Cracked (Voipwiki.com) July 13th
Ebay to Buy Skype in $2.6bn Deal (BBC News) Sept 12th 2005