Skype Reducing ‘Supernodes’, Tightening Security: Researcher

Posted on May 2 2012 - 4:48am by Editorial Staff

Seems like security controversy hits Microsoft acquired Skype but what it appears that the software giant has already started working on some behind the light things in order to improve the service by altering Skype’s use of “supernodes”. Security researcher Kostya Kortchinsky writes that he had discovered as many as 48,000 supernodes in his exploration of Skype’s architecture but the number dropped to 10,000 last month. Kortchinsky told Ars Technica that the move away from the P2P implementation “will definitely bring more stability and security and it may also bring more clients” to the service.

Mark Gillett, CVP, Skype Product Engineering & Operations said in a statement: As part of our ongoing commitment to continually improve the Skype user experience, we developed supernodes which can be located on dedicated servers within secure datacentres. This has not changed the underlying nature of Skype’s peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, in which supernodes simply allow users to find one another (calls do not pass through supernodes). We believe this approach has immediate performance, scalability and availability benefits for the hundreds of millions of users that make up the Skype community.

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