Vulnerabilities of signaling system number 7 (SS7) to cyber attacks and how to mitigate against these vulnerabilities.

As the mobile network subscriber base exponentially increases due to some attractive offerings such as anytime anywhere accessibility, seamless roaming, inexpensive handsets with sophisticated applications, and Internet connectivity, the mobile telecommunications network has now become the primary source of communication for not only business and pleasure, but also for the many life and mission critical services. This mass popularisation of telecommunications services has resulted in a heavily loaded Signaling System number 7 (SS7) signaling network which is used in Second and Third Generations (2G and 3G) mobile networks and is needed for call control and services such as caller identity, roaming, and for sending short message servirces. SS7 signaling has enjoyed remarkable popularity for providing acceptable voice quality with negligible connection delays, pos- sibly due to its circuit-switched heritage. However, the traditional SS7 networks are expensive to lease and to expand, hence to cater for the growing signaling demand and to provide the seamless interconnectivity between the SS7 and IP networks a new suite of protocols known as Signaling Transport (SIGTRAN) has been designed to carry SS7 signaling messages over IP. Due to the intersignaling between the circuit-switched and the packet-switched networks, the mo- bile networks have now left the “walled garden”, which is a privileged, closed and isolated ecosystem under the full control of mobile carriers, using proprietary protocols and has minimal security risks due to restricted user access. Potentially, intersignaling can be exploited from the IP side to disrupt the services provided on the circuit-switched side. This study demonstrates the vulnerabilities of SS7 messages to cyber-attacks while being trans- ported over IP networks and proposes some solutions based on securing both the IP transport and SCTP layers of the SIGTRAN protocol stack

Privacy in Voice-over-IP mitigating the risks at SIP intermediaries

Telephony plays a fundamental role in our society. It enables remote parties to interact and express themselves over great distances. The telephone as a means of communicating has become part of every day life. Organisations and industry are now looking at Voice over IP (VoIP) technologies. They want to take advantage of new and previously unavailable voice services. Various interested parties are seeking to leverage the emerging VoIP technology for more flexible and efficient communication between staff, clients and partners. VoIP is a recent innovation enabled by Next Generation Network (NGN). It provides and enables means of communication over a digital network, specifically the Internet. VoIP is gaining wide spread adoption and will ultimately replace traditional telephony. The result of this trend is a ubiquitous, global and digital communication infrastructure. VoIP, however, still faces many challenges. It is not yet as reliable and dependable as the current Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). The employed communication protocols are immature with many security flaws and weaknesses. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a popular VoIP protocol does not sufficiently protect a users privacy. A user’s information is neither encrypted nor secured when calling a remote party. There is a lack of control over the information included in the SIP messages. Our specific concern is that private and sensitive information is exchanged over the public internet. This dissertation concerns itself with the communication path chosen by SIP when establishing a session with a remote party. In SIP, VoIP calls are established over unknown and untrusted intermediaries to reach the desired party. We analyse the SIP headers to determine the information leakage at each chosen intermediary. Our concerns for possible breach of privacy when using SIP were confirmed by the findings. A user’s privacy can be compromised through the extraction of explicit private details reflected in SIP headers. It is further possible to profile the user and determine communication habits from implicit time, location and device information. Our research proposes enhancements to SIP. Each intermediary must digitally sign over the SIP headers ensuring the communication path was not be altered. These signatures are added sequentially creating a chain of certified intermediaries. Our enhancements to SIP do not seek to encrypt the headers, but to use these intermediary signatures to reduce the risk of information leakage. We created a model of our proposed enhancements for attaching signatures at each intermediary. The model also provides a means of identifying unknown or malicious intermediaries prior to establishing a SIP session. Finally, the model was specified in Z notation. The Z specification language was well suited to accurately and precisely represent our model. This formal notation was adopted to specify the types, states and model behaviour. The specification was validated using the Z type-checker ZTC. CopyrightDissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2010.Computer Scienceunrestricte

Key distribution technique for IPTV services with support for admission control and user defined groups

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

COVID-19 in Africa: A challenging road to recovery

Using data from the IIAG, COVID-19 in Africa: a challenging road to recovery outlines ten key governance challenges, across health, the economy and society, that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. It also provides new insights on the continent's potential to respond

Applying human-like intelligence to future generation network to improve communication efficiency

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-257).In recent decades, communications network has evolved at drastic speed to provide advanced and intelligent services. This strengthening service provision owes to the successful establishment of various intelligent networks and the use of artificial intelligence, pervasive computing, and social networking in communications. It has consequently endowed network users with abundant choices of communication services. While these communications services are bringing convenience to human lives, people in turn are performing more tasks. The current network with its large number of available communications services is then often burdening network users with the complexity and inflexibility in using these services. In particular, the network lacks the initiative and the ability to investigate a user’s most recent communication needs and subsequently adjust the manner of service provision according to these needs and user connecting possibilities. The network needs to be more intelligent to handle these problems. We therefore propose importing human-like intelligence into the network to facilitate communication-session processing according to user needs

Mitigating the Recessional Impact of COVID-19 on Nigerian Economy through Agricultural Enterprises Promotion

COVID-19 is undoubtedly depressing the world economy and the Nigerian economy is no exception. The economic slowdown is triggering food and non-food price shocks with declining income to small, medium, and large- scale businesses. This paper examines the implications of COVID-19 pandemic on the Nigerian economy and highlights how the promotion of agricultural enterprises can help to mitigate the recessional impact arising from the pandemic. The paper is extensively theoretical and conceptual in its nature. Findings show that COVID-19 pandemic, though a threat to lives and the economy, has provided opportunities in some enterprises. Digital technologies have become a positive enabler facilitating business continuity and connecting people more than ever in the phase of economic paralysis due to lockdown and movement restriction of people. The paper concludes that scaling up of innovations in agribusiness enterprises will save the country from the imminent deleterious impact of COVID-19. Digital agriculture solutions and e-commerce are required in order to stimulate food production, processing, and marketing during and after the pandemic. Active measures are required to reduce food wastes and losses that may arise from supply chain bottlenecks. Provision of subsidies to food producers and reduction of import tariffs will assist investors in agribusinesses to continue their activities. The government could temporarily review taxation policy on imported goods to compensate for potential cost increases and the impact of the devaluation of the currency