Design and Implementation of a Skype Protocol Analyzer

Abstract

Proprietary protocols on the Internet often pose challenges for users and analysts to determine how secure the applications are or how easy private information can be accessed. This work presents a tool that processes packets generated by Skype and analyzes its proprietary implementation. The goal of the exercise is to determine how one may reverse engineer a proprietary protocol and obtain private information. The results demonstrate that a buddy-list of a target user can be obtained through the developed Skype Protocol Analyzer.