8/10/2023 0 Comments Skype technologiesare not revealed to users or escrowed to third parties and are discarded when the session ends," said Hass, the service's senior vice president for technology, emerging media and digital strategy. As Soghoian suggests, Skype could even authorize encryption keys that would allow the government to impersonate a user, and then perform a so-called "man in the middle attack," with a government agent secretly inserted into the middle of a phone call, able to eavesdrop.Īnswering a query from NBC News, Skype executive Chaim Haas, said in an email that the firm does not save keys for government use. Skype could create and keep a spare set of encryption keys to unlock message at government requests. There could be a backdoor built into the service. There are, of course, plenty of other ways that law enforcement could theoretically crack its way into Skype calls. Moreover, he pointed out, they were first deployed back in 2010, well before Microsoft purchased Skype. "Skype to Skype calls do not flow through our data centers and the 'supernodes' are not involved in passing media (audio or video) between Skype clients," Gillett wrote. What's more, they connect only addressing information - actual phone calls don't flow through those servers, so they do not provide a convenient access point for wiretaps. “Supernodes,” which route Skype traffic through central servers rather than allowing point-to-point connections, merely improve the flow of information around the service, Gillett said. "Nothing could be further from the truth," wrote Mark Gillett, the firm's chief development and operations officer, speaking generally about accusations that Skype is acting "against our users' interests." He issued a point-by- response to many charge specifically leveled against Skype, saying that nothing about Skype's "posture and policies" with regard to law enforcement had changed. In a rare step, Skype responded with a detailed rebuttal on its website. A flurry of bloggers - noting the introduction of centralized "supernodes" by Skype that might provide a central point for eavesdropping, and a Microsoft patent describing a technological method for eavesdropping - put two and two together and speculated that Skype's communications tools were no longer fully private. That mistrust set the stage for a flurry of reports this week suggesting that the service is no longer fully private. "There are a lot of people who deep in their gut mistrust Skype," said, Soghoian, a fellow at the Washington, D.C., advocacy group Open Society Foundations, which says it promotes democracy around the world. In his view, Skype has been coy, and only answered in generalities. Since that time, privacy advocates like Chris Soghoian have called on Skype to clearly spell out its secret-keeping technologies and provide assurance that it's not cutting deal with government agencies, enabling secret wiretaps or other intrusions. A scrappy start-up can ignore the Chinese government and the FBI for a while a Wall Street company with billions in revenue cannot. Since Skype first went corporate in 2005, with its purchase by eBay, that battleground has grown even more complicated. Skype makes it possible to have phone calls that can't be wiretapped - making the service a battleground in this perpetual privacy vs. Governments, of course, hate secrets, and secret-keeping technologies that might enable what they identify as criminal behavior.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |