Category Archives: VoIP Security Tools

Blue Box Podcast #44: SIP attack tools, VoIP security news, IETF, patents, ZRTP, Skype security, Asterisk war dialling, voice biometrics, listener comments and more

Blue Box Podcast #44 is now available for download. In this show, we cover the new SIP attack tools released by Mark Collier and Dave Endler, talk about the IETF meeting, ZRTP and Phil Zimmermann’s patent disclosure, Skype security issues, a war dialling script for Asterisk, listener comments and much more. Feedback is, as always, welcome.

Additional VoIP Attack Tools

David Endler and I posted several new tools on our “Hacking Exposed” website, www.hackingvoip.com. We also provided updates and better README files for some of the existing tools. Here is a quick summary of the new tools:

  • rtpinsertsound/rtpmixsound – these tools take the contents of a .wav or tcpdump format file and insert or mix in the sound. These tools require access (sniffing of the VoIP traffic but not necessarily MITM) to the RTP stream, so they can properly craft sequence numbers, timestamps, etc. rtpinsertsound, with the right timing, can be used to add words or phrases to a conversation. rtpmixsound can be used to merge in background audio, like noise, sounds from a “gentlemans club”, curse words, etc., etc. These tools have been tested in a variety of vendor environments and work in pretty much any environment, where encryption isn’t used.
  • redirectpoison – this tool works in a SIP signaling environment, to monitor for an INVITE request and respond with a SIP redirect response, causing the issuing system to direct a new INVITE to another location. This tool requires access to the SIP signaling, but does not require a MITM (Man-in-the-middle attack). We tested this tool with the Asterisk and SER SIP proxies, along with a variety of SIP phones.
  • spitter – this tool works in conjunction with Asterisk, to set up a voice SPAM/SPIT generation platform. Once Asterisk is set up, spitter is used to schedule any number of calls, using your choice of audio files.

The tools come with README files, so they should be pretty easy to use. Please let us know what you think. We are particularly interested in results for the rtpxxxsound tools. A number of us “security experts” have been warning of these attacks, but this is the first set of tools I have seen that actually accomplish them.

Just Plain Cuckoo

According to news in PC Pro magazine, authorities in Switzerland have come up with an unorthodox plan to tackle call tapping of Skype and other VoIP users.  VoIP calls can be end-to-end encrypted, which means that tapping on the Internet itself is often not practical.  For example Skype use an undisclosed encryption algorithm and key exchange system.  Phil Zimmermann’s Zfone employs perfect secrecy so that the conversation cannot even be listened to later offline when the encryption key has been obtained.

So the Swiss plan?  Tap the calls on the PC, by means of installing some kind of trojan to tap into the audio stream before it is encrypted.  It would be installed either by the authorities or remotely by the ISP.

Now, this is a daft idea on so many different levels that it’s hard to know where to begin.  In an ordered society like Switzerland you could expect a high level of compliance with this kind of procedure.  Unfortunately, the ones that won’t comply (for example malevolent hackers; gangsters; terrorists) are probably the ones that you are most interested in gathering intelligence about.  Secondly, it’s a gift for criminals, since if you leave a backdoor open, the PC already compromised, then someone will likely exploit this for criminal purposes.

With the right software in place, audio could be relayed in from elsewhere, allowing criminals to make calls “on your phone”, possibly implicating you in a crime.  Similarly, audio could be relayed out, so that those outside the government service could tap your phone, a boon to tabloid newspapers and blackmailers.

Finally, in a world of ever more mobile users, is this approach even practical?  Mobile users with GPRS in their phone or PDA can connect to the Internet without even touching a Swiss ISP.  Crime doesn’t necessarily stop at borders these days, couldn’t criminals just be in and out of the country before the G-Man sneaks some tapping software onto their laptop?

 

 

Blue Box Podcast #36 – Black Hat super-sized edition focusing on voice security talks

Blue Box Podcast #36 is now available for download. In this super-sized show, we discuss the voice security talks given at Black Hat 2006 last week in Las Vegas. There is an interview with David Endler and Mark Collier about the VoIP security tools they released, an interview with Ofir Arkin about his talk on NAC and involvment with VOIPSA, and many other news items coming out of the conference.

Beyond the Bitpipe

I recently installed BT Communicator, which is British Telecom’s answer to Skype.  Like Skype it allows free calls (PC to PC) and offers the capability to break out onto the PSTN to call anyone anywhere, for a fee.  Being naturally curious, I fired up Wireshark and captured some of the activity on the line, and I was delighted to discover that it’s using our old friends SIP and RTP to signal and carry the calls.  In contrast, if you capture Skype traffic, you can’t figure out what’s happening unless you put an awful lot of research into it.

Are BT offering unique value with their service?  I think so: firstly the billing backs into the same BT billing system, and ends up on my phone bill, where Skype operate a pay-as-you-go system that needs charging via card etc.  One less thing to worry about with BT.  Secondly, unlike Skype, BT are embracing open standards, but still with an eye on security (the service uses Proxy Authentication to secure the calls, but no crypto yet).  Skype consider their softphone to be an important part of their service offering, and won’t open up the protocol to other clients.  As I see it, most of the Skype value is in the sheer number of customers that use the service, and I imagine Ebay also saw it this way, but this is a topic for another day.  BT, on the other hand, are looking further out to the open standards world, where it will be an advantage to be SIP-compatible.  Perhaps this is already architected to slot right in to their IMS backbone, 21CN.  One final advantage is that there are actually people out there that don’t use the Internet much, and don’t know about Skype.  So BT are actually using their marketing money to tell these people that they can call their friends for free using Communicator.   Of course they are cannibalizing their own call revenue, but perhaps they see the bigger picture, that like Skype, this can be used to pull through all kinds of other revenue generating services.

I like this approach to business better than that of companies like Shanghai Telecom and China Telecom, who reportedly have bought software technology to detect and block Skype traffic.  Presumably, they will also be blocking SIP, since this is technically much less difficult.  The thinking behind this is that if people aren’t calling with Skype, then they have to pick up the legacy phone.  This kind of thinking, “I don’t make any money out of this; can I block it?” is just the kind of blinkered approach that leads to telco lobbying in the net neutrality debate in the US.  Companies like AT&T would like to get paid twice, once by the Skypes and Googles, and then again by their telco customers.  Of course we’d all like to get paid twice, but most of us don’t have the political clout to make it happen. 

BT have not always been the most dynamic company, but I imagine that if they can learn something about business from Skype, then all large telcos stand a chance.  So come on guys, stop wringing your hands and worrying about becoming the bitpipe, and get out there and innovate.

Homosapien Too

I sent a message the other day on ebay, and came across a new feature: to submit a message you now have to prove you are not spammer but human (these being opposites) with a Turing test or CAPTCHA.  Ok, these things are common on web systems these days, but the new slant here was that if you could not read the graphic, you could click on a link and download an audio version to listen to instead.  This is also one of the proposed strategies for dealing with SPIT (SPAM over Internet Telephony) in our VoIP systems of the future, i.e. interact with the bona fide caller or spammer and present them with some kind of test or quiz before they get put through.  This could be as simple as “Press 8 to speak to Martyn or 0 for voicemail.”

But there is also an arms race aspect to this, for the smart spammer might also employ automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, which is increasingly cheap and effective due to increasing CPU performance and falling hardware prices.  Their ASR server could be programmed to understand digits, and so have a fair stab at giving the correct answer to the CAPTCHA. 

It interested me that on ebay, the audio file downloaded did not have a pristine recording of the digits being read out, but instead had a variety of noises in the background: white noise; some fragments of speech.  Naturally it’s quite easy for a human to extract the digits from the background noise, but this is just the kind of chaff that might confuse the enemy radar, so to speak, of the spammer’s ASR system.

Happy July 4th to those of you in the USA, and welcome back all our friends that just celebrated Canada Day.

What’s all the Fuzz about?

I’m guessing there’s going to be a resurgence soon in protocol fuzzing against different VoIP phones, PBXs, and especially VoIP softphones. The practice of fuzzing, otherwise known as robustness testing or functional protocol testing, has been around for a while in the security community. The practice has proven itself to be pretty effective at automating vulnerability discovery in applications and devices that support a target protocol.

The prize for the most prolific university fuzzing results to date belongs to the PROTOS project of Oulu University’s Secure Programming Group. Through various incarnations of student projects, the PROTOS group has been faithfully discovering vulnerabilities in a variety of protocol implementations, including SIP and H.323. Ari Takanen of that group eventually graduated and went on to cofound a commercial fuzzing tool company called Codenomicon, along with others from Oulu. In just the last year alone, the market has seen several other new commercial fuzzing entrants including:

Today, VoIP is starting to become a more interesting target for security researchers as the technology becomes more affordable and popular among enterprise customers. While it would be ideal if all VoIP vendors tested their own products internally for security bugs, the reality is that not all of them have the time, resources, or even the security DNA to find them all ahead of time.

For a great list of other fuzzing tools and presentations, check out Matthew Franz’s wiki.