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Spies to Use Skype to Send Secret Messages?

by Blake Besharian on June 3, 2008 at 04:19 PM



Not to make you paranoid, but the next time you hear some static during an Internet phone conversation, it might not be a bad connection. In fact, it could be spies trying to send you packets of encoded information along with the data that is delivering your friend's voice. Well, probably not, but researchers in Poland have at least announced that it's actually possible.

Information scientists at the Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw, Poland, have published an article in New Scientist magazine about a program they have created, which hides secret messages in Internet (VoIP) phone calls (aka Skype, Vonage, etc). The program inserts packets of information that are delivered along with the rest of the information for the call. This packet is deciphered by a program on the other end of the call. Right now, the program causes a bit of audio distortion, but the researchers are working to remove any perceptible sound distortions, which could giveaway the presence of a secret message.

Tyler Moore, a computer security engineer at the University of Cambridge says "It's an interesting proposal: it makes sense to hide data in a VoIP payload," but, he adds, the identities of the two callers are not hidden like the data, and often that is more important than the message. Because of this, the technology doesn't have many practical applications yet, and it may be a while yet before we see James Bond-types using Skype to transmit secret messages. [Source: New Scientist]

Tags: breaking news, BreakingNews, spy tech, SpyTech, voip

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