Big privacy flaw in Skype


Keith Ross is a professor of computer science at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU. He's presenting some research on Skype at a conference next week in Berlin. The problem, he says, has to do with Skype's use of the Internet Protocol, or IP address on your computer and your ISP, or Internet service provider.

"If you have Skype running in your laptop," he says, "then I or any other attacker can inconspicuously call you, obtain your current IP address and your current location without you ever knowing about it."

While it's not exactly a GPS determination of where you are, Ross says the IP address can show, "The city you're in and also determine if you're at work or at home because your IP address not only exposes your location but also exposes the ISP you're using and from that we can determine if it's your employer or residential ISP or whatever."

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