A stunning blog entry by VOIPWiki revealed that a Chinese company have successfully reverse engineered the famous VOIP software, Skype. Charlie Paglee, blogger of VOIPWiki, received a call to his Skype from his friend who is working in the Chinese company and told him that the call is made through the cloned Skype software.

Picture taken from VOIPWiki.

Quoted:
We talked (on the cloned Skype) for a little over nine minutes before the call dropped. Then I called him back using my Skype and we spoke for another three minutes.

This cloned Skype client is able to use Skype’s network and act as one of the Skype clients. Doing so would possibly cause the current Skype Super Nodes and the network to deteriorate once too many non-Skype clients are being used.

Skype has so far been threatening Telco’s business in China by providing its free VOIP service on the Internet. Chinese regulatory authorities have also looked into possible ways to block Skype in various regions of China. Now with such cloned Skype client, Telcos in China would gladly licensed it and produce a competing Skype client for use in China.

Skype made an official response to this matter and claimed that even if it was possible to reverse engineer the software code, the cloned software would lack the feature set and reliability of Skype. This is because no amount of reverse engineering would threaten Skype’s cryptographic security or integrity.