Jail Skype!

Skype is the most used voip software used accross the world. Unfortunately when you dig a bit about it you may find yourself surprised with its developers’ way of understanding the word “privacy”. Reports have been made about Skype binaries reading sensitive Linux password files and user personal data. As Skype is the perfect example of closed source application one cannot even know if these statements are true. Moreover, it seems Skype makes heavy use of obfuscation methods. It just so happens an Archer explained this simple way of jailing Skype into a reserved Linux account.

The idea is very simple: create a skype group and a skype user with its own home directory. Then just setup your regular user to launch the skype binary as this user using sudo. If you grant this skype user restricted rw rights, this will elegantly jail this impolite Skype software.

---