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Traffic analysis attacks on Skype VoIP calls

Published: 01 July 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Skype is one of the most popular voice-over-IP (VoIP) service providers. One of the main reasons for the popularity of Skype VoIP services is its unique set of features to protect privacy of VoIP calls such as strong encryption, proprietary protocols, unknown codecs, dynamic path selection, and the constant packet rate. In this paper, we propose a class of passive traffic analysis attacks to compromise privacy of Skype VoIP calls. The proposed attacks are based on application-level features extracted from VoIP call traces. The proposed attacks are evaluated by extensive experiments over different types of networks including commercialized anonymity networks and our campus network. The experiment results show that the proposed traffic analysis attacks can greatly compromise the privacy of Skype calls. Possible countermeasure to mitigate the proposed traffic analysis attacks are analyzed in this paper.

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Cited By

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  • (2019)A survey on anonymous voice over IP communication: attacks and defensesElectronic Commerce Research10.1007/s10660-019-09369-019:3(655-687)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2019
  • (2015)Game-theoretic strategies for IDS deployment in peer-to-peer networksInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-015-9582-117:5(1017-1028)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2015

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Computer Communications
Computer Communications  Volume 34, Issue 10
July, 2011
124 pages

Publisher

Elsevier Science Publishers B. V.

Netherlands

Publication History

Published: 01 July 2011

Author Tags

  1. HMM
  2. Skype
  3. VoIP

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View all
  • (2019)A survey on anonymous voice over IP communication: attacks and defensesElectronic Commerce Research10.1007/s10660-019-09369-019:3(655-687)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2019
  • (2015)Game-theoretic strategies for IDS deployment in peer-to-peer networksInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-015-9582-117:5(1017-1028)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2015

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