[Beowulf] Re: "hobbyists"

[Kilian CAVALOTTI]

On Friday 20 June 2008 06:51:51 am Tim Cutts wrote:
> That'll be why we don't allow Skype, except on one network which,
> from a security perspective, is considered to be outside the
> Institute, and just as untrusted as the rest of the Internet.

I think that's a wise decision. Skype is a giant black box. Fabrice 
Desclaux published a fair amount of cryptanalysis papers about Skype, 
each one more frightening than the previous ([1], [2] and [3])

[1]http://www.secdev.org/conf/skype_BHEU06.handout.pdf
[2]http://recon.cx/en/f/vskype-part1.pdf
[3]http://recon.cx/en/f/vskype-part2.pdf

In 2005, an official recommendation has been issued by the French 
authorities to prohibit usage of Skype in the National Center for 
Scientific Research (CNRS)'s networks (see [4], and [5] for the 
machine-translated version)

[4]http://www.urec.cnrs.fr/rubrique216.html
[5]http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.urec.cnrs.fr%2Frubrique216.html&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=fr&tl=en
-- 
Kilian