VoIP Security: Not an Afterthought

ABSTRACT

Voice over IP (VoIP) promises to up-end a century-old model of voice telephony by breaking the traditional monolithic service model of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and changing the point of control and provision from the central office switch to the end user's device. Placing intelligence at the edge, in the Internet tradition, has a number of consequences: a wider community of developers - in particular the large community of Web service developers - can work on voice applications; open interfaces and decomposable functionality facilitate multi-vendor and homegrown solutions; and open source and nonproprietary software development can facilitate innovation and experimentation.

REFERENCES

• 1: J. Rosenberg , H. Schulzrinne , G. Camarillo , A. Johnston , J. Peterson , R. Sparks , M. Handley , E. Schooler, SIP: Session Initiation Protocol, RFC Editor, 2002
• 2: M. Baugher , D. McGrew , M. Naslund , E. Carrara , K. Norrman, The Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP), RFC Editor, 2004
• 3: H. Schulzrinne , S. Casner , R. Frederick , V. Jacobson, RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications, RFC Editor, 2003
• 4: 4. Lennox, J., and Schulzrinne, H. Feature Interaction in Internet Telephony. Sixth Workshop on Feature Interactions in Telecom and Software Systems, Glasgow, Scotland, June 2000.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Voice I/O

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.5 Local and Wide-Area Networks
          Subjects: Internet (e.g., TCP/IP)
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Reliability, availability, and serviceability

  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.6 Security and Protection
          Subjects: Information flow controls

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Performance, Security