StarForce's comments come in the wake of blog postings by security researcher Efim Bushmanov who, earlier this month, claimed to have reverse engineered the Skype protocol.

"My aim is to make Skype open source," he said in a blog posting on June 3, adding links to download executable files compatible with Skype versions 1.4, 3.8, and 4.1, as well as IDA Pro disassembly database files, and - crucially, Infosecurity notes - his reverse engineered pseudo source code.

Liliya Volodina, StarForce Technologies marketing director, said that Bushmanov's took Skype's client application, disassembled the code and then worked out how the protocol plus its encryption functions operate.

"It's not clear how much time it took but it seems that the hacker was working alone", she said, adding that he is now recruiting other people holding the same views (say, other hackers) who, he says, `have enough time' to finish the project.

"Enough time is a loose concept and we can guess that he spent more than a year to disassemble the program when he worked alone. This is a good illustration of the fact that giving enough protection to a program's code may prevent its reverse-engineering for a long time, especially if the hacker doesn't know the basic principles of the protection", she explained.

Volodina went on to say that there could be tough times ahead for Skype.

In addition to the fact that the company needs to fix program instabilities, she says, it also needs to rebuild the protocol and code protection.

Source

Posted by Dal at 10:35 AM | Direct Link | TrackBacks (0) Posted to Skype

It's no secret that Apple has been militant in suing competitors that employ technologies even remotely close to Apple's own. But when it comes to stealing ideas for apps from developers, Apple's intentions are a bit more dubious.

The Register reports that Apple is being accused of stealing the idea of one UK-based college student and developer — Greg Hughes. In May 2010, Hughes submitted an app for consideration called Wi-Fi Sync, which allowed users to sync their iTunes libraries wirelessly.

Posted by Dal at 10:28 AM | Direct Link | TrackBacks (0) Posted to WiFi / Wireless

 

One such development is what is being called the so-called "Internet in a suitcase" (above), which has been funded by $2 million in State Department money via a grant to members of the New America Foundation.

One suitcase in and of itself doesn't create an Internet. Instead, a series of such devices, relying on "mesh network" technology creates an "invisible wireless web without a centralized hub." Using these devices, the transmission, whether it's voice, image, e-mail, or any data, can hop from "suitcase to suitcase," bypassing the official network.

If it sounds like sort of a series of cell phone towers, it could indeed be thought of in those terms. Aaron Kaplan, an Austrian cybersecurity expert says that he has helped set up a functioning mesh network in Vienna. He added that similar related systems have already been used in Indonesia, Venezuela, and elsewhere in the world. His work will be used as part of the suitcase project.

Posted by Dal at 10:15 AM | Direct Link | TrackBacks (0) Posted to VoIP Hardware