2nd International ICST Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools

Research Article

Enhanced Skype Traffic Identification

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/valuetools.2007.1782,
        author={Marcell Per\^{e}nyi and S\^{a}ndor Moln\^{a}r},
        title={Enhanced Skype Traffic Identification},
        proceedings={2nd International ICST Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools},
        proceedings_a={VALUETOOLS},
        year={2010},
        month={5},
        keywords={Skype traffic identification analysis},
        doi={10.4108/valuetools.2007.1782}
    }
    
  • Marcell Perényi
    Sándor Molnár
    Year: 2010
    Enhanced Skype Traffic Identification
    VALUETOOLS
    ICST
    DOI: 10.4108/valuetools.2007.1782
Marcell Perényi1,*, Sándor Molnár1,*
  • 1: Budapest University of Technology & Economics, Department of Telecommunications & Media Informatics, Budapest, Hungary
*Contact email: perenyim@tmit.bme.hu, molnar@tmit.bme.hu

Abstract

Skype applies strong encryption to provide secure communication inside the whole Skype network. The communication ports of clients are chosen randomly. As a consequence, traditional port based or payload based identification of Skype traffic cannot be applied. In this paper we present a novel flow dynamics based identification method to discover both Skype hosts and voice calls. The method is based only on packet headers and extracted flow level information. This method is the second algorithm from our research. It has a significant improvement over our first method [1]. It can detect the randomly selected communication port of the Skype client, which makes the identification more reliable. The whole identification process is scripted in Transact-SQL, thus it can be executed automatically. We also present the validation of the new algorithm together with the analysis of the identification results.