A team of researchers and linguists have found a fatal flaw in supposedly encrypted internet phone calls that allow them to eavesdrop on conversations.University of North Carolina scientists took a novel approach to 'listening in' on voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) conversations by analysing the 'encrypted' data packets used to transmit people's conversations.
VOIP services such as Skype transmit speech over the internet by encoding and the encrypting the conversation into individual data packets.
According to The New Scientist, Linguists noticed the size of each packet mirrored the composition of the original speech itself - allowing them to reconstruct words and phrases from the original voice.
By splitting the packet sequences into phonemes - the smallest sounds that make up a language - linguists were able to reconstruct the data into discernible words. (more)
