A Comprehensive Survey of Voice over IP Security Research

Abstract

Abstract-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.

An efficient and easily deployable method for dealing with DoS in SIP services

“…The selection of these symbols reflects the different parts of a SIP message that an attacker could craft in order to launch a resource consumption or other type of attack. In fact, this method of assault is well-documented and evaluated in various researches so far [7,8,9,31]. For instance, a malicious actor could fabricate different SIP messages by modifying some of their parts 135 such as <Via>, <From>, <To>, <Call-ID> headers or even the First Line (corresponding to symbols S2 -S5, and S1 in Figure 1) depending on the situation at hand.…”

“…Despite the advantages users enjoy due to SIP flexibility, various attacks have been 10 identified against SIP-based VoIP services [7,8,9]. To alleviate, if not eliminate, such security flaws a diversity of detection and prevention solutions have been proposed in the literature [10,11,12,13,14].…”

“…It is based on the sum of AI values of all the messages contained in a given M set , and it is computed using formula (9).…”

A Privacy-Preserving Entropy-Driven Framework for Tracing DoS Attacks in VoIP

“…For instance, a malicious user could select to replay the same message (by using identical instances of S7) or fabricate different SIP messages by modifying certain segments such as FROM, TO, Call-ID, headers or even the First Line (symbols S1 to S5) depending on the case. For the interested reader, a detailed analysis for resource consumption attacks in VoIP can be found in [2]- [4].…”

Two-stage SPIT detection scheme with betweenness centrality and social trust

“…may abuse them for advertisement or fraud, which is called SPIT (Spam over Internet Telephony) [1]. Hence, detecting SPIT calls or spammers in voice communication services is an urgent demand for the service providers.…”