P2P Encrypted VOIP

Thomas Shaddack shaddack at ns.arachne.cz
Tue Oct 14 02:36:58 PDT 2003


On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, Guerry Semones wrote:
> I caught the announcement this morning from Skype concerning their
> P2P-based VOIP (free) product.  Apparently this is the Kazaa
> founder's new company.  The communications are supposed to be
> encrypted, etc., etc.

This was mentioned on a SepakFreely list as well.

In short:

Platform-locked (Windows-only).
Closed-source (dubious crypto implementation).
Proprietary technology (compatible only with itself).
Vendor-dependence.

The P2P-ness is a good idea, though. Why don't publish contact information
in eg. Gnutella, as a small text (eg. XML) file, searchable by name? It
shouldn't be impossible to write a helper program for SpeakFreely to
access those. Several methods are possible, including yellow-pages servers
in a DNS-like system; employing more than one at once could make it robust
enough for practical use.

Alternatively, why don't use an IM-like infrastructure for the call
negotiations? Could we use IM of sort to set up the call? Combination of
SpeakFreely with Jabber could solve most of the problems, from the contact
publishing (where the "phone number" could equal the Jabber ID) to
connection negotiation itself (where Jabber can provide the backbone for
the signalling, telling each side the IP on which the communication
partner resides, or if there is NAT involved and what measure to use
then). Something principially similar to users telling each other over
Jabber how to set the VoIP software, but automated. Jabber protocol is
well-documented, clients exist for next to everything, next to everybody
can run a server.

Opinions, comments?





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