The recent emergence of two sets of serious security vulnerabilities in Skype, the popular VoIP communications software app, couldn't have come at a worse time for the firm. Disclosure of the security flaws came days after the publication of a security evaluation of the Skype that wrote about its security model in glowing terms.
Dr Thomas A Berson, an independent cryptographer and computer security expert and author of the report (PDF), admitted in the document that his four month evaluation (which largely focused on cryptographic issues) was incomplete. This statement turned out to be too true after it emerged Security researchers identified two groups of potentially serious security vulnerabilities involving Skype.
In the first case, a security bug in the Skype for Windows means the software can be crashed and forced to execute arbitrary code through a buffer overflow when presented with malformed URLs in the Skype-specific URI format callto:// and skype://. Skype can also be made to execute arbitrary code via the importation of a maliciously formated VCARD (an electronic business card format).