Session Initiation Protocol Attacks and Challenges

In recent years, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has become widely used in current internet protocols. It is a text-based protocol much like Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) and Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP). SIP is a strong enough signaling protocol on the internet for establishing, maintaining, and terminating session. In this paper the areas of security and attacks in SIP are discussed. We consider attacks from diverse related perspectives. The authentication schemes are compared, the representative existing solutions are highlighted, and several remaining research challenges are identified. Finally, the taxonomy of SIP threat will be presented

Cryptanalysis and improvement of password-authenticated key agreement for session initiation protocol using smart cards

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is one of the most commonly used protocols for handling sessions for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)-based communications, and the security of SIP is becoming increasingly important. Recently, Zhang et al. proposed a password authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP by using smart cards to protect the VoIP communications between users. Their protocol provided some unique features, such as mutual authentication, no password table needed, and password updating freely. In this study, we performed cryptanalysis of Zhang et al.'s protocol and found that their protocol was vulnerable to the impersonation attack although the protocol could withstand several other attacks. A malicious attacker could compute other users’ privacy keys and then impersonated the users to cheat the SIP server. Furthermore, we proposed an improved password authentication key agreement protocol for SIP, which overcame the weakness of Zhang et al.’s protocol and was more suitable for VoIP communications

Robust and efficient password authenticated key agreement with user anonymity for session initiation protocol-based communications

A suitable key agreement protocol plays an essential role in protecting the communications over open channels among users using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). This paper presents a robust and flexible password authenticated key agreement protocol with user anonymity for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) used by VoIP communications. Security analysis demonstrates that our protocol enjoys many unique properties, such as user anonymity, no password table, session key agreement, mutual authentication, password updating freely and conveniently revoking lost smartcards etc. Furthermore, our protocol can resist the replay attack, the impersonation attack, the stolen-verifier attack, the man-in-middle attack, the Denning-Sacco attack, and the offline dictionary attack with or without smartcards. Finally, performance analysis shows that our protocol is more suitable for practical application in comparison with other related protocols

A lightweight privacy preserving authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP-based VoIP

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an essential part of most Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) architecture. Although SIP provides attractive features, it is exposed to various security threats, and so an efficient and secure authentication scheme is sought to enhance the security of SIP. Several attempts have been made to address the tradeoff problem between security and efficiency, but designing a successful authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP is still a challenging task from the viewpoint of both performance and security, because performance and security as two critical factors affecting SIP applications always seem contradictory. In this study, we employ biometrics to design a lightweight privacy preserving authentication protocol for SIP based on symmetric encryption, achieving a delicate balance between performance and security. In addition, the proposed authentication protocol can fully protect the privacy of biometric characteristics and data identity, which has not been considered in previous work. The completeness of the proposed protocol is demonstrated by Gong, Needham, and Yahalom (GNY) logic. Performance analysis shows that our proposed protocol increases efficiency significantly in comparison with other related protocols

Efficient and flexible password authenticated key agreement for Voice over Internet Protocol session initiation protocol using smart card

Providing a suitable key agreement protocol for session initiation protocol is crucial to protecting the communication among the users over the open channel. This paper presents an efficient and flexible password authenticated key agreement protocol for session initiation protocol associated with Voice over Internet Protocol. The proposed protocol has many unique properties, such as session key agreement, mutual authentication, password updating function and the server not needing to maintain a password or verification table, and so on. In addition, our protocol is secure against the replay attack, the impersonation attack, the stolen-verifier attack, the man-in-the-middle attack, the Denning–Sacco attack, and the offline dictionary attack with or without the smart card

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

Integrating identity-based cryptography in IMS service authentication

Nowadays, the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a promising research field. Many ongoing works related to the security and the performances of its employment are presented to the research community. Although, the security and data privacy aspects are very important in the IMS global objectives, they observe little attention so far. Secure access to multimedia services is based on SIP and HTTP digest on top of IMS architecture. The standard deploys AKA-MD5 for the terminal authentication. The third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) provided Generic Bootstrapping Architecture (GBA) to authenticate the subscriber before accessing multimedia services over HTTP. In this paper, we propose a new IMS Service Authentication scheme using Identity Based cryptography (IBC). This new scheme will lead to better performances when there are simultaneous authentication requests using Identity-based Batch Verification. We analyzed the security of our new protocol and we presented a performance evaluation of its cryptographic operationsComment: 13Page