Monthly Archives: September 2008

Slides: SIP Trunking and Security in an Enterprise Network

Earlier this month out at ITEXPO in Los Angeles, I participated in the Ingate SIP Trunking seminars as I have been doing for the last year or so. My talk was “SIP Trunking and Security in an Enterprise Network“. The slides are available for viewing or download from my SlideShare account and I’ll also embed them here in this post.

I did record the presentation in both audio and video and hope to be making that available as a Blue Box podcast some time soon. I’ll then sync the slides to the audio. Meanwhile… enjoy the slides!

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US government rolling out largest DNSSEC deployment

It’s not “VoIP security”-related, but this piece in NetworkWorld today is worth a read: “Feds tighten security on .gov“. Here’s the intro:

When you file your taxes online, you want to be sure that the Web site you visit — www.irs.gov — is operated by the Internal Revenue Service and not a scam artist. By the end of next year, you can be confident that every U.S. government Web page is being served up by the appropriate agency.

That’s because the feds have launched the largest-ever rollout of a new authentication mechanism for the Internet’s DNS. All federal agencies are deploying DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) on the .gov top-level domain, and some expect that once that rollout is complete, banks and other businesses might be encouraged to follow suit for their sites.

The article goes on at some length into what the US government is doing, the issues involved and why it all matters. From a larger “Internet infrastructure” point-of-view, actions such as securing the DNS infrastructure will only help in securing services such as VoIP. There’s still a long way to go to getting DNSSEC widely available, but I applaud the US government for helping push efforts along.

FYI, the article references the obsolete RFC 2065 for DNSSEC. For those wishing the read the standard itself, DNSSEC is now defined in RFC’s 4033, 4034 and 4035 with a bit of an update in RFC 4470.

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Mark Collier and SecureLogix release new VoIP security tools

In a message to the VOIPSEC mailing list over the weekend, Mark Collier announced the release of a new suite of VoIP security test tools. Mark, as you may recall, is the co-author with (VOIPSA Chair) David Endler of the book “Hacking Exposed: VoIP” and as part of the book publication he and Dave made available a series of voip security tools through their hackingvoip.com website.

Now, Mark’s back with a second version of those VoIP security tools. He describes the new tools in one blog post on his VoIP security blog and announces their availability in a second blog post. Here’s his description of new tools:

We also built several new tools:

– Several new flood-based DoS tools, which generate floods using different SIP requests, including byeflood, optionsflood, regflood, and subflood. The regflood tool is certainly the most potent of the group.

– dirsniff and dirsortmerge – a passive scanner that builds a directory of valid SIP phone addresses. By using the dirsortmerge tool, you can manage results from this tool, as well as output from the dirscan active scanner.

– Call Monitor and sipsniffer – this tool provides a GUI that shows active SIP calls. The tool allows you to select a call and terminate it (via teardown) or insert/mix in audio (via rtpinsertsound or rtpmixsound). The tool allows you to define up to 10 sound files, that can be inserted/mixed in on command. The tool also streams the call audio to the XMMS player, so you can listen in and “time” when you affect the call.

The Call Monitor tool is particularly interesting. It makes using the rtpinsertsound/rtpmixsound tools a lot easier and more effective. It makes real audio manipulation possible.

Interestingly, the tools are not being made available through Hackingvoip.com but rather directly from SecureLogix’s web site, where you have to register first to download the tools.

Mark also provides a PowerPoint presentation about the “Call Monitor” tool he mentions here. He’d mentioned this tool to me once before when we met at one of the conferences…. basically it provides a “point-and-click” interface to allow you to inject or mix in new audio into existing audio streams. Making it this easy is definitely a scary prospect (and another good argument for why you should be using SRTP to encrypt audio streams).

Anyway, the new tools are now out there if you want to try them out. (Joining the long list of existing VoIP security tools.)

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Webinar on SIP Security on Thurs, Sept 11, by Audiocodes and Interactive Intelligence

Many of you may have received this in your email inbox – Audiocodes and Interactive Intelligence are jointly sponsoring a TMCnet webinar on Thursday, September 11, 2008, at 12noon US Eastern time called “Do You Know Who is Listening? – The Truth of Enterprise SIP Security The abstract is here:

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has emerged as the predominant protocol for VoIP deployments. While SIP is gaining headway in the IP communications market, any new technology brings with it some inherent security challenges. In this webinar, we discuss these challenges, the misconceptions surrounding SIP Security, and examine the tools available to counter them. This session will also explore robust solutions that not only tackle security threats, but also empower businesses to proactively protect their networks from current and future attacks. Included in this webinar, we will examine the Interactive Intelligence suite of products as a communications platform case study that empowers businesses to tackle security threats while maintaining affordability and performance.

Obviously it is a vendor presentation with the associated perspective, but for those wishing to attend, you can register online.


[VOIPSA is a vendor-neutral organization and we do not endorse or recommend solutions from any particular vendors. However, as our interest is in elevating the level of discussion about VoIP security issues in general, we are glad to post notices here about upcoming vendor presentations.]

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