SecSip: A Stateful Firewall for SIP-based Networks

SIP-based networks are becoming the de-facto standard for voice, video and instant messaging services. Being exposed to many threats while playing an major role in the operation of essential services, the need for dedicated security management approaches is rapidly increasing. In this paper we present an original security management approach based on a specific vulnerability aware SIP stateful firewall. Through known attack descriptions, we illustrate the power of the configuration language of the firewall which uses the capability to specify stateful objects that track data from multiple SIP elements within their lifetime. We demonstrate through measurements on a real implementation of the firewall its efficiency and performance

A Comprehensive Survey of Voice over IP Security Research

We present a comprehensive survey of Voice over IP security academic research, using a set of 245 publications forming a closed cross-citation set. We classify these papers according to an extended version of the VoIP Security Alliance (VoIPSA) Threat Taxonomy. Our goal is to provide a roadmap for researchers seeking to understand existing capabilities and to identify gaps in addressing the numerous threats and vulnerabilities present in VoIP systems. We discuss the implications of our findings with respect to vulnerabilities reported in a variety of VoIP products. We identify two specific problem areas (denial of service, and service abuse) as requiring significant more attention from the research community. We also find that the overwhelming majority of the surveyed work takes a black box view of VoIP systems that avoids examining their internal structure and implementation. Such an approach may miss the mark in terms of addressing the main sources of vulnerabilities, i.e., implementation bugs and misconfigurations. Finally, we argue for further work on understanding cross-protocol and cross-mechanism vulnerabilities (emergent properties), which are the byproduct of a highly complex system-of-systems and an indication of the issues in future large-scale systems

Preventing Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks on the IMS Emergency Services Support through Adaptive Firewall Pinholing

Emergency services are vital services that Next Generation Networks (NGNs) have to provide. As the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is in the heart of NGNs, 3GPP has carried the burden of specifying a standardized IMS-based emergency services framework. Unfortunately, like any other IP-based standards, the IMS-based emergency service framework is prone to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. We propose in this work, a simple but efficient solution that can prevent certain types of such attacks by creating firewall pinholes that regular clients will surely be able to pass in contrast to the attackers clients. Our solution was implemented, tested in an appropriate testbed, and its efficiency was proven.Comment: 17 Pages, IJNGN Journa

Privacy-preserving, User-centric VoIP CAPTCHA Challenges: an Integrated Solution in the SIP Environment

Purpose – This work aims to argue that it is possible to address discrimination issues that naturally arise in contemporary audio CAPTCHA challenges and potentially enhance the effectiveness of audio CAPTCHA systems by adapting the challenges to the user characteristics. Design/methodology/approach – A prototype has been designed, called PrivCAPTCHA, to offer privacy-preserving, user-centric CAPTCHA challenges. Anonymous credential proofs are integrated into the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) protocol and the approach is evaluated in a real-world Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) environment. Findings – The results of this work indicate that it is possible to create VoIP CAPTCHA services offering privacy-preserving, user-centric challenges while maintaining sufficient efficiency. Research limitations/implications – The proposed approach was evaluated through an experimental implementation to demonstrate its feasibility. Additional features, such as appropriate user interfaces and efficiency optimisations, would be useful for a commercial product. Security measures to protect the system from attacks against the SIP protocol would be useful to counteract the effects of the introduced overhead. Future research could investigate the use of this approach on non-audio CAPTCHA services. Practical implications – PrivCAPTCHA is expected to achieve fairer, non-discriminating CAPTCHA services while protecting the user’s privacy. Adoption success relies upon the general need for employment of privacy-preserving practices in electronic interactions. Social implications – This approach is expected to enhance the quality of life of users, who will now receive CAPTCHA challenges closer to their characteristics. This applies especially to users with disabilities. Additionally, as a privacy-preserving service, this approach is expected to increase trust during the use of services that use it. Originality/value – To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first comprehensive proposal for privacy-preserving CAPTCHA challenge adaptation. The proposed system aims at providing an improved CAPTCHA service that is more appropriate for and trusted by human users

Scalable detection of SIP fuzzing attacks

Abstrac

VoIP security - attacks and solutions

Voice over IP (VoIP) technology is being extensively and rapidly deployed. Flexibility and cost efficiency are the key factors luring enterprises to transition to VoIP. Some security problems may surface with the widespread deployment of VoIP. This article presents an overview of VoIP systems and its security issues. First, we briefly describe basic VoIP architecture and its fundamental differences compared to PSTN. Next, basic VoIP protocols used for signaling and media transport, as well as defense mechanisms are described. Finally, current and potential VoIP attacks along with the approaches that have been adopted to counter the attacks are discussed

IoT-MQTT based denial of service attack modelling and detection

Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to transform the quality of life and provide new business opportunities with its wide range of applications. However, the bene_ts of this emerging paradigm are coupled with serious cyber security issues. The lack of strong cyber security measures in protecting IoT systems can result in cyber attacks targeting all the layers of IoT architecture which includes the IoT devices, the IoT communication protocols and the services accessing the IoT data. Various IoT malware such as Mirai, BASHLITE and BrickBot show an already rising IoT device based attacks as well as the usage of infected IoT devices to launch other cyber attacks. However, as sustained IoT deployment and functionality are heavily reliant on the use of e_ective data communication protocols, the attacks on other layers of IoT architecture are anticipated to increase. In the IoT landscape, the publish/- subscribe based Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol is widely popular. Hence, cyber security threats against the MQTT protocol are projected to rise at par with its increasing use by IoT manufacturers. In particular, the Internet exposed MQTT brokers are vulnerable to protocolbased Application Layer Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, which have been known to cause wide spread service disruptions in legacy systems. In this thesis, we propose Application Layer based DoS attacks that target the authentication and authorisation mechanism of the the MQTT protocol. In addition, we also propose an MQTT protocol attack detection framework based on machine learning. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the impact of authentication and authorisation DoS attacks on three opensource MQTT brokers. Based on the proposed DoS attack scenarios, an IoT-MQTT attack dataset was generated to evaluate the e_ectiveness of the proposed framework to detect these malicious attacks. The DoS attack evaluation results obtained indicate that such attacks can overwhelm the MQTT brokers resources even when legitimate access to it was denied and resources were restricted. The evaluations also indicate that the proposed DoS attack scenarios can signi_cantly increase the MQTT message delay, especially in QoS2 messages causing heavy tail latencies. In addition, the proposed MQTT features showed high attack detection accuracy compared to simply using TCP based features to detect MQTT based attacks. It was also observed that the protocol _eld size and length based features drastically reduced the false positive rates and hence, are suitable for detecting IoT based attacks

VeTo: reference manual

The SIP protocol is established as the defacto standard for media session signaling, in particular for voice-over IP services. Many research works and alert bulletins have reported various vulnerabilities in this protocol. These vulnerabilities are either inherent to the protocol specification or arise as flaws within SIP stack implementations or erroneous configurations. To protect SIP-based networks from the exploitation of such vulnerabilities, patches may be released for the implementation bugs, the SIP specification may be revisited to cover the specification errors and configuration guidelines can be issued to offer good configuration receipts to administrators. The time to patching and revisiting specification may be considerable. To overcome this problem, a first-line of defense against SIP vulnerabilities has to be developed. In a previous work, we have presented a stateful firewall architecture dedicated to SIP-based networks protection. The firewall runtime uses a domain specific language, called VeTo. Its design, syntax and semantics are described in this work.Le protocole SIP est aujourd'hui le standard de fait pour la signalisation des sessions multimédia á l'échelle de l'Internet. Plusieurs travaux ainsi que des bulletins d'alertes ont reporté l'existence des différentes vulnérabilités au niveau de ses implantations, de ses spécifications, de ses implémentations et de ses paramétrages. La protection du protocole SIP de l'exploitation de ces vulnérabilités nécessite l'application des patches au niveau de ses implantations á bien que la révision des ses spécifications et la publication de recettes de bonnes pratiques pour sa configuration. Ces actions prennent un temps considérable avant d'être menées. Afin de résoudre ces problémes, une première ligne de défense nécessite d'être mise en place. Dans un précédent travail, nous avons proposé une architecture de défense reposant sur un pare-feu dédié au protocole SIP. Ce pare-feu s'appuie sur un langage, nommé VeTo dédié á la spécification de régles de prévention contre les vulnérabilités présentes dans le protocole SIP. Ce rapport détaille la syntaxe, la sémantique et son infrastructure support