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Analysis of information leakage from encrypted Skype conversations

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Abstract

Voice over IP (VoIP) has experienced a tremendous growth over the last few years and is now widely used among the population and for business purposes. The security of such VoIP systems is often assumed, creating a false sense of privacy. This paper investigates in detail the leakage of information from Skype, a widely used and protected VoIP application. Experiments have shown that isolated phonemes can be classified and given sentences identified. By using the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm, frequently used in speech processing, an accuracy of 60% can be reached. The results can be further improved by choosing specific training data and reach an accuracy of 83% under specific conditions. The initial results being speaker dependent, an approach involving the Kalman filter is proposed to extract the kernel of all training signals.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK

    Benoît Dupasquier, Stefan Burschka, Kieran McLaughlin & Sakir Sezer

Authors
  1. Benoît Dupasquier
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  2. Stefan Burschka
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  3. Kieran McLaughlin
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  4. Sakir Sezer
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Correspondence to Benoît Dupasquier.

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Dupasquier, B., Burschka, S., McLaughlin, K. et al. Analysis of information leakage from encrypted Skype conversations. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 9, 313–325 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-010-0111-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-010-0111-4

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