In the news: Soon to be published, Skype back-door trojan code?

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Sunday 30 August 2009 12:01:22 Tim wrote:
> Marko Vojinovic:
> > Is there any initiative or attempts to reverse engineer its protocol?
>
> It's closed source because they want it to be secret, other vendors with
> the same attitude repeatedly change their protocols to thwart third
> party clients, and I wouldn't expect skype to behave any differently.
> That sort of thing puts a bit of a dent in people wanting to reverse
> engineer something.

I understand that some vendors do this, but I believe skype needs to preserve 
protocol compatibility over different versions, simply in order not to break 
communication between peers with different software versions. I doubt it can 
force all users to upgrade to the latest protocol simultaneously, like some 
other vendors can. So I think it would be enough to reverse-engineer *some* 
version of the protocol, and have Ekiga present itself as some (maybe a little 
older version of) skype. I do understand that reverse-engineering closed and 
intentionally secret software is not easy in itself, but I believe it would 
have a good lifetime if done.

And I also believe such a project would get immediate and strong support from 
the community. I myself would do a lot to help out --- testing, internet 
hosting, cpu cycles, writing documentation... I just don't have any money to 
offer, and I lack the knowledge to do serious coding.

But surely I am not the first one to have such an idea, or am I?

Best, :-)
Marko