A few weeks ago the French government banned Skype in French universities. They called Skype “insecure”, but the reasons are in fact all others. The origin of this ban came from the defense ministry and they have in fact good reasons for not liking Skype: It is too secure for them and contrary to email, wired or wireless phone, they cannot intercept such communications.

It is a classical example of the French government impeding technological advances because of fear of loosing control. In the past for example cryptography was strongly controlled too. Actually if they would care that much about security, they would start by removing Windows from all university computers, but that’s another subject.

Now Skype has a good answer to this , in the form of a report done by an independent computer security expert, who did a review of Skype security and encryption mechanisms.

His conclusions:

The designers of Skype did not hesitate to employ cryptography widely and well in order to establish a foundation of trust, authenticity, and confidentiality for their peer-to-peer services. The implementers of Skype implemented the cryptographic functions correctly and efficiently. As a result, the confidentiality of a Skype session is far greater than that offered by a wired or wireless telephone call or by email and email.

So if you don’t want the French government to be able to listen to your communications use Skype.

skype

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 23rd, 2005 at 10:51 am and is filed under Skype. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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