Well here’s a turn up for the books. Thirty year old Russian coder Efim Bushmanov has apparently reverse engineered some of the proprietary code behind Skype. If true, this means that there could soon be Open Source products available which give access to the Skype platform without any Skype services being involved.

When you remember that Skype has 560 million registered users and dominates the internet phone market, this is a very big deal indeed. At the very least it should result in more hooks being available between Skype and other Open Source communication products such as Asterix PBX. Which will undoubtedly be a good thing for the customer!

Funny how it has come to light mere weeks after Microsoft announced it was buying Skype, eh? Good article.

My aim is to make skype open source. And find friends who can spend many hours for completely reverse it. Now, most of hard things already done(for 1.x/3.x/4.x versions of skype). Including rc4 and arithmetic compression. You have unique chance to take a look on skype internal protocol and encryption. You will see what it uses strong AES and RSA encryption with public key infrastructure. Here is yet a working “send message to skype” code. However, this is based on old skype 1.4 version protocol, which now slightly changed.