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

Characterization and modeling of top spam botnets

The increasing impact of the Internet in the global economy has transformed Botnets into one of the most relevant security threats for citizens, organizations and governments. Despite the significant efforts that have been made over the last years to understand this phenomenon and develop detection techniques and countermeasures, this continues to be a field with big challenges to address. Several approaches can be taken to study Botnets: analyze its source code, which can be a hard task because it is usually unavailable; study the control mechanism, particularly the activity of its Command and Control server(s); study its behavior, by measuring real traffic and collecting relevant statistics. In this work, we have installed some of the most popular spam Botnets, captured the originated traffic and characterized it in order to identify the main trends/patterns of their activity. From the intensive statistics that were collected, it was possible to conclude that there are distinct features between Botnets that can be explored to build efficient detection methodologies. Based on this study, the second part of the paper proposes a generic and systematic model to describe the network dynamics whenever a Botnet threat is detected, defining all actors, dimensions, states and actions that need to be taken into account at each moment. We believe that this type of modeling approach is the basis for developing systematic and integrated frameworks and strategies to predict and fight Botnet threats in an efficient way.This research was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, under research project PTDC/EEA-TEL/101880/2008

Analysis of Security Threats in Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP)

The VoIP system is build on the IP network, so it is affected by the IP network security problem. It has many security problems because of the security mechanism of VoIP system and other external factors. These effects relate to the following three aspects: confidentiality, integrity and availability. This paper makes a detailed analysis discussed several security potential threats by dividing it into several categories like social, eavesdropping, service abuse, etc. and finally shows how this threats are harmful to VoIP. Keywords-VoIP; Security threat

Security Enhancements in Voice Over Ip Networks

Voice delivery over IP networks including VoIP (Voice over IP) and VoLTE (Voice over LTE) are emerging as the alternatives to the conventional public telephony networks. With the growing number of subscribers and the global integration of 4/5G by operations, VoIP/VoLTE as the only option for voice delivery becomes an attractive target to be abused and exploited by malicious attackers. This dissertation aims to address some of the security challenges in VoIP/VoLTE. When we examine the past events to identify trends and changes in attacking strategies, we find that spam calls, caller-ID spoofing, and DoS attacks are the most imminent threats to VoIP deployments. Compared to email spam, voice spam will be much more obnoxious and time consuming nuisance for human subscribers to filter out. Since the threat of voice spam could become as serious as email spam, we first focus on spam detection and propose a content-based approach to protect telephone subscribers\u27 voice mailboxes from voice spam. Caller-ID has long been used to enable the callee parties know who is calling, verify his identity for authentication and his physical location for emergency services. VoIP and other packet switched networks such as all-IP Long Term Evolution (LTE) network provide flexibility that helps subscribers to use arbitrary caller-ID. Moreover, interconnecting between IP telephony and other Circuit-Switched (CS) legacy telephone networks has also weakened the security of caller-ID systems. We observe that the determination of true identity of a calling device helps us in preventing many VoIP attacks, such as caller-ID spoofing, spamming and call flooding attacks. This motivates us to take a very different approach to the VoIP problems and attempt to answer a fundamental question: is it possible to know the type of a device a subscriber uses to originate a call? By exploiting the impreciseness of the codec sampling rate in the caller\u27s RTP streams, we propose a fuzzy rule-based system to remotely identify calling devices. Finally, we propose a caller-ID based public key infrastructure for VoIP and VoLTE that provides signature generation at the calling party side as well as signature verification at the callee party side. The proposed signature can be used as caller-ID trust to prevent caller-ID spoofing and unsolicited calls. Our approach is based on the identity-based cryptography, and it also leverages the Domain Name System (DNS) and proxy servers in the VoIP architecture, as well as the Home Subscriber Server (HSS) and Call Session Control Function (CSCF) in the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture. Using OPNET, we then develop a comprehensive simulation testbed for the evaluation of our proposed infrastructure. Our simulation results show that the average call setup delays induced by our infrastructure are hardly noticeable by telephony subscribers and the extra signaling overhead is negligible. Therefore, our proposed infrastructure can be adopted to widely verify caller-ID in telephony networks

Developing Best Practices for Securing VoIP Communication for a non-profit Organization

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is the most widely used service around the world. The proficiency of it utilizing the web has increased awesome ubiquity in the current years. With this notoriety, there is expanding worry about the wellbeing of the system. The robbery or loss of the information being exchanged is great concern. For example, a basic problem for researchers who are developing safeguards for VoIP systems is the level of threats and other issues experienced by the non-profit organizations while implementing VoIP communication. This problem originated when non-profits received pressure from their donors not to implement VoIP communication because it will record important and valuable information of their bank account, including their bank balance, and consequently, exposing them to the public. Other dangers include safeguarding secrecy, respectability, and accessibility of the system, known as CIA. dangers. To battle these dangers, some security conventions and calculations have been produced. For example, the H.235 has been investigated, their calculations updated, and it is currently regarded as the most recent and effective system for security of the VoIP system. Another method for battling issues and concerns, and one that is the most proficient due to bigger budgets than non-profits, is VoIP being utilized in new structures and the IT work force. Fortunately, the expanding interest of VoIP has guaranteed and emphasized the requirement for more research to build up the effective security structures and countermeasures of CIA threats. This investigation examines the methods by which such security issues concerning VoIP can be set out to give an appropriate, secure and effective method for correspondence and data trade. In this postulation, the analyst will profoundly examine the relief of VoIP security issues