Tuesday, February 17, 2004

VoIP and wiretapping. This is a battle that is going to be lost. Wardriving + Skype = amazing combo. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] The comments in the article about broadband providers being asked to wiretap are inane. Have these guys ever heard of tunneling? The only reason VoIP providers are in the hot seat is that they offer centralized services, in particular connections to the PSTN. Those are as tappable as the old PSTN. But Internet calls via Skype or any similar end-to-end software are not vulnerable. On the other hand, the end points can be very vulnerable to snooping if they are not carefully managed. The average Internet cafe machine is likely to be very vulnerable. A carefully designed Trojan could make many end points easier to tap than the PSTN. Sure, a few careful people would avoid potentially compromised machines, but they would have been hard to tap even before. 9:12:29 PM