Fontanini, Piero Patric

VoIP Security

IP telephony is a technology in which IP networks are being used as a medium to transmit voice. IP telephony is also referred to as Voice over IP or VoIP. There are some main challenges with VoIP security today. Mainly because call setup information and actual "voice data" is transported on an open network like Internet. There are work done in securing VoIP, but the solutions are still far from ideal.
SIP is used in VoIP as an application-layer signaling protocol for creating, modifying, and terminating sessions with one or more participants. The master research project will focus on securing the SIP protocol and especially on user and proxy authentication.

Research questions

How can the Signaling protocol used in VoIP be secured?

• What alternatives are there?
• Is confidentiality needed and if so, how can this be provided?
• How can integrity be provided?
• What are the availability requirements in VoIP?
• How can these availability requirements be assured?

How can user and network components be identified in a VoIP system?

• How can a user identify it self to a service provider in a reliable way? Users and service providers need to be sure that only legitimate users can be authenticated to prevent misuse like spoofing.
• How can a user be assured of a service providers identity? or how can a user be assured that he/she is talking to the right service provider.
• How can a service provider identify it self to other service providers? The service provider of the recipient needs to be sure that it talking to a legitimate service provider for an initiator.
• How can the recipient be sure of the initiators identity? Is the initiator authenticated by a trusted party?