Authentic NATFW NSLP Signaling in Next Generation Networks

Abstract

Today, the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is widely used as the primary signaling protocol for multimedia communications over the Internet. It is also considered as the basic protocol of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) of Next Generation Network architectures. However, security devices such as firewalls and NATs (Network Address Translation) prevent their traversal for SIP protocol. This issue has prompted several research works that led to a multitude of solutions such as NATFW NSLP. Nevertheless, the approach adopted by the latter weakens the NATs and firewalls from security point of view. Therefore, to prevent unauthenticated users and unauthorized access, authentication and authorization mechanisms should be included in this protocol. In this work, we proposed the HMAC authentication mechanism that we have integrated in NATFW NSLP protocol, and with a test platform, we evaluated its performance metrics.