While many people are hearing the great news about using Skype as a free way to text, talk, and even video-chat with people all over the world, many don’t know that they are not only using a great free service; but, they are also "doing the right thing" from an Information Security perspective. This article goes over the privacy that is being provided to Skype VOIP users "out of the box" without any additional configuration being required.
When you decide to Skype your Aunt Betsy who also uses Skype, and who always reveals intimate (and often embarrassing) details about the health of everyone in the family, you can rest assured that your conversation is private between your two Skype Clients because of a built-in technology known as Cryptography.
A simple definition for Cryptography would be, "the art of writing or solving codes". In our case, Cryptography is taking all of the information you are sending to Aunt Betsy and changing it into data that cannot be understood without the other side (Aunt Betsy’s Skype program) changing it back to its original form. How this "encrypting" and "decrypting" is done is a matter of high math algorithms that were probably created by that know it all who sat behind you in calculus class in High School.
Without boring you with the details of the Skype Architecture, suffice it to say that because of the way skype works, it had to be designed using encryption out of the box. Because of the design decisions that the developers of Skype chose, every single Skype session uses encryption.
An encrypted session is started between you and Aunt Betsy the moment you initiate the communication, and before any data is transferred. For the crypto-geeks and cypherpunks among my readers, we can specify that Skype uses a 256-bit symmetric key based upon the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm (also sometimes called Rijndael). The key used is unique for the session and the two systems being used for the communication. Once you say good-bye to Aunt Betsy, and tear down the session between your two systems, the encryption key used for that session is no longer valid after the Skype client program is closed.
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Skype handles all of the negotiations to arrange for private communications between skype users behind the scenes. Skype is one of the few Instant Messaging utilities to offer free encryption, and it may be the only one to have it enabled by default without the need for the end user to learn something new, or fight with tricky cross program configurations.
What does this mean to you and Aunt Betsy? She can go on at length about Uncle Joe’s hemorrhoids for as long as you can bear it!
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