On Monday, Skype officially released what actually went wrong which triggered a worldwide outage of their P2P VOIP Service. Although their statement makes some sense, it leads to one universal question whats the future of Peer to peer VOIP networks and services.
We all know Skype is and even today a leading VOIP solution company. Literally millions of users around the world are dependent on Skype and their 2 days outage has again proved that VOIP is not secure. We have seen lately VOIP Solution/Services companies are having too much to handle and end up flat on face. Do i need to mention Sunrocket?
Skype however is backed by Ebay and its a very strong company. However a financial rich company isnt the only thing people look for in a service. Quality of service and creditibility of its uptime is one of the most important factors in choosing a VOIP Service. Imagine what businesses running Skype must have gone through during the 2 days outage. Personal users can switch to other services but business users are highly dependable on one service however they have disaster recovery plan in place which is not always full proof.
Lets see what exactly went wrong as per skype's Official statement,
"On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.
The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.
Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days."
That means the latest windows update triggered a hidden security bug in Skype. Fair enough? We agree but does that gurantee that there are no more bugs? Well no one could guarantee you that and not even skype. But one very important issue has surfaced after this event. The very basic identity of P2P VOIP Network. Basically, when windows update triggered the skype known bug it spread across the networked peers as Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service. RPC calls well known and they are mainly used in Virus/Worms to spread across and restart user's machine indefinately.
That means in a Peer to peer network, 1 PC can harm multiple computers at once. Imagine the Risk, Its like a viral Virus spread, faster than you can even think of. Tommorow if there is a DoS (Denial of Service) attack on Skype network, imagine the kinda of disaster it can result into.
The whole insecure architecture of peer to peer VOIP networks has again surfaced. Now there are more providers on the similar lines, the latest VOIP provider is Ooma. Are they secure? They also use p2p to connect peers and transmit data.
The future doesnt seem too secure for P2P VOIP network. Ooma and Skype will have to keep their eyes open before its too late. That could be another end of a "Sun"
0 comments:
Post a Comment