An Analysis of the Skype Peer-to-Peer Internet Telephony Protocol

By Salman Baset, Henning Schulzrinne. Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2006. 25TH IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, 2004

1,002 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Skype is a peer-to-peer VoIP client developed in 2003 by the organization that created Kazaa. Skype claims that it can work almost seamlessly across NATs and firewalls and has better voice quality than other VoIP clients. It encrypts calls end-to-end, and stores user information in a decentralized fashion. Skype also supports instant messaging and conferencing. This paper analyzes key Skype functions such as login, NAT and firewall traversal, call establishment, media transfer, codecs, and conferencing under three different network setups. Analysis is performed by careful study of the Skype network traffic and by intercepting the shared library and system calls of Skype. We draw a map of super nodes to which Skype establishes a TCP connection at login.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7306a4271389cbc6454ee6f3d66f948c4091a88

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In Computer Networks and Communications

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

An Experimental Study of the Skype Peer-to-Peer VoIP System (2005, methodology): “Network packet level analysis of KaZaA [16] and of Skype [1] support this claim by uncovering striking similarities in their connection setup, and their use of a " supernode " -based hierarchical peer-topeer network.”
Quantifying Skype user satisfaction (2006, methodology): “To detect possible Skype traffic in real time, we leverage some known properties of Skype clients [1, 12].”
UbeHealth: A Personalized Ubiquitous Cloud and Edge-Enabled Networked Healthcare System for Smart Cities (2018, background): “Skype has a decentralized architecture in which the clients (host nodes) connect to one of the many supernodes for registering with login servers [142], [143].”
Revealing skype traffic: when randomness plays with you (2007, methodology): “In [3], authors provide an overview of Skype design and functions, exploring many Skype aspects under different networ k setups: both Skype users with machines with public IP addresse s, or one of them behind port-restricted NAT, or, finally, both u sers behind a port-restricted NAT and UDP-restrict”
A Survey of Payload-Based Traffic Classification Approaches (2014, background): “— such as the Skype protocol [42] — and encrypted traffic is out of scope for protocol decoding.”