VoIP providers, like Skype and Vonage are considering implementing compression for their networks. That could save them a ton of money on bandwidth and it shouldn’t affect call quality. In essence they will only compress some sounds that actually aren’t filled with a lot of data. It’s a sort of linguistic trick, where short universal consonant counts like the K sound in C or the Tee sound in T don’t have to be sampled as well because we basically all know what a T or K sounds like.
Well that would be great except for the fact that a team from Johns Hopkins has proved that this makes the communications much easier to decode. This basically comes down to a weakness in the actual algorithms that are being used to encrypt this traffic. The problem is that if you want a highly secure algorithm, you need to pad a fair amount of bogus data into the stream to prevent analysis of this type, however that becomes quite expensive as processors have to encrypt and decrypt it, plus you have to pay for more bandwidth to transmit the conversation.
The technology hasn’t been implemented yet, so the Johns Hopkin team is hoping that this will slow down implementation until a better solution can be found.
Link to the story at NewScientistTech, which happens to quote one of my geek heroes, Phil Zimmerman, creator of PGP(Pretty Good Privacy).
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