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Reverse Engineering – Skype Censoring with Low-level Hooks of Internal APIs
Description: A highly-protected application able to provide Skype control functions with a number of management and monitoring features including message censoring, action logging and blocking.
Challenge: Skype, as a very popular product, has a strong protection system with implemented debug techniques, hook prevention technologies, internal code obfuscation, etc. The challenge included the presupposed control qualities for monitoring that contradicted then existing state of affairs. Both public Skype APIs and other existing analogues proved to be ineffective because of the lack of functionality and GUI hooks base. Neither of abovementioned APIs could provide the potential for the required features as full monitoring and action blocking. The solution had to endure numerous Skype updates.
Solution: We started with a profound research on protection levels and the core logic of Skype. The team continued with code analysis and detecting the effective points needed to install custom hooks for the obtained internal APIs. After the deployment of the architecture it became possible to use Skype message censorship, activity monitoring, and action blocking.
Success story: Our hook solution survived two years of frequent application updates (from v.5.1 to 6.7) with minimal required support and prospects of minimal additions.
