Recently I’ve been using Skype and have been quite impressed, especially with how effortlessly it glides through any firewalls and NATs that it finds in its way, almost as if they don’t even exist. I was even more impressed by “Vanilla Skype”, a presentation (part 1, part 2) that details the Herculean efforts that the developers of Skype went to to encrypt and obfuscate the workings of their client and network, and the truly Super-Herculean efforts of a pair of hackers who have circumvented all the encryption and booby traps and figured it all out anyway!

The presentation was given at REcon 2006, a computer security conference. There’s probably other equally interesting stuff in the rest of the proceedings.