Identification and Analysis of Skype Peer-to-Peer Traffic

Abstract

More and more applications are adopting peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. Skype is a P2P based, popular VoIP software. The software works almost seamlessly across Network Address Translations (NATs) and firewalls and has better voice quality than most IM applications. The communication protocol and source code of Skype are undisclosed. It uses high strength encryption and random port number selection, which render the traditional flow identification solutions invalid. In this paper, we first obtain the Skype clients and super nodes by analyzing the process of login and calling in different network environments. Then we propose a method to identify Skype traffic based on Skype nodes and flow features. Our proposed method makes the previously hard-to-detect Skype traffic, especially voice service traffic, much easier to identify. We design an identification system utilizing the proposed method and implement the system in a LAN network. We also successfully identified Skype traffic in one of the largest Internet Providers over a period of 93 hours, during which over 30TB data were transmitted. Through experiments, we show that our proposed approach and implementations can indeed identify Skype traffic with higher accuracy and effectiveness.