[VOIPSEC] VoIP Attack : How feasible

[DePietro, John]

Dan,

Regarding, sip-outbound's approach.  Do you have a description of this, draft-rfc or whitepaper? 

John 
-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Wing [mailto:dwing at cisco.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2006 12:21 PM
To: 'Geoff Devine'; DePietro, John; 'Pankaj Shroff'
Cc: Voipsec at voipsa.org
Subject: RE: [VOIPSEC] VoIP Attack : How feasible


> John DePietro writes:
> > I my opinion even though TLS (SIPS, HTTPS, S/MIME) and SRTP provide
> > better end-to-end security; are optional for wireless standards
> > (3GPP, 3GPP2 and WIMAX), they do not fit as economically as IPSEC
> > from a network equipment deployment perspective, yet!
> 
> My ongoing issue with TLS is the technical difficulty of making TCP
> redundant in a fully scaled carrier-class environment.  If you don't
> make it redundant, you end up having storms of TCP SYN and TLS
> authentication messages whenever you have a node failure or an access
> network failure.  This blows any five 9's availability requirement out
> of the water. 

sip-outbound's approach is to make TLS connections to two edge
proxies.

> I believe the 3GPP approach is the correct 
> one... put SIP on a diet so it fits within an MTU and 
> you can use UDP. 

The problem isn't just SIP but also SDP.  Here is an example of SDP
that is over 10K bytes long:
http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/mmusic/current/msg04205.html

And the problem is fragmenting UDP, too.  See:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-heffner-frag-harmful-02.txt

It is time to abandon SIP over UDP.

-d

> Run transport
> mode IPSec which is very straightforward to make redundant.  Sadly,
> SIGCOMP is an unfortunately complex way of putting SIP on a diet.  We
> need to invent a better "binary SIP" compression standard.  
>
> I think TLS is somewhat better when used inside the core 
> where you have
> a much smaller number of connections/sockets and don't face the
> initialization/restart storm problem.  TCP is a little worrying to use
> in the core since a few dropped packets can cause flow control to be
> invoked on mission-critical signaling.  SCTP is a better transport and
> is less prone to this problem.
>
> SRTP is fairly straightforward to make redundant in a carrier-class
> media gateway.  The only tricky bit is dealing with RTP 
> sequence number
> wrap for a codec that uses silence suppression/voice activity 
> detection.
> 
> 
> Geoff Devine
> Chief Architect
> Cedar Point Communications
> 
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