VoIP Blog - Tehrani.com

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Webinar News

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Tadiran and Digium Interviews

If you haven't had a chance, please take a look at some of the latest executive suite interviews. One is with Ron Bregman of Tadiran. This Israeli-based company has been in telecom for many years with a reputation for bulletproof system design.

In addition and perhaps at the opposite end of the spectrum -- as their product is free and open-source - is an interview with Mark Spencer of Digium. Digium is the company behind Asterisk and has been generating lots of buzz lately. Even though this isn't new news I did cover the interconnection between Asterisk and Skype this morning. I am looking forward to catching up with Mark Spencer at ITEXPO next week.

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VoIPWorkgroup

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Quintuple Play

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Mobile video blog test

This is a video of me catching Tom Keating off guard in his office. Whoops -- I almost got a social security number on here. Not good.

Blogged via wireless handheld

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IPTV Conference

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Call Center Wait Times

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Pika Introduces Skype VoIP to Asterisk

Two of the biggest trends in IP communications are Skype and Asterisk. There is just something so compelling about the free model --consumers and enterprises can't seem to get enough of either of the products these two companies offer.

But what if there was a way to bridge the Asterisk community with Skype users. What a great world that would be. Imagine allowing customers to Skype into your call center or imagine allowing remote workers to calling via Skype and stay connected to the Asterisk system where they could use IVR and speech recognition to navigate to the right mailbox or person.

My friends that day has arrived and it is courtesy of PIKA Technologies a company playing in the communications development space for over a decade. This company was one of the original players in the DSP resource game when Dialogic, Rhetorex, Natural Micrososystems and Brooktrout were other major contributors to the space.

The product name is PIKA Connect for Asterisk and it will be available next month according to the company. If you are interested in seeing how this technology works visit www.pikatechnologies.com and use your Skype client to get connected to the company's auto attendant.

If you are interested in becoming a participant in the beta program be sure to e-mail David Clarke right away as I am sure there will be heavy demand.

My take on this news is Skype and Asterisk will both be helped tremendously by the news. The younger generation who embrace Skype will love to be able to call companies without having to dial a regular phone. They will be able to speak in a manner they are most comfortable with. In the end companies will be heavily incented to implement such solutions as they will give their customers what they want and also reduce their 800 number bills.

Come see Asterisk and all the other IP communications vendors that matter under one roof in one week at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in San Diego California. 9,000 attendees from around 70 countries will be on hand to network and find out what is next in the ever-changing world of IP communications.

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Protecting IMS/UMA and IP Communications

The advent of any technology is when unscrupulous users see if they can take advantage of it. The first computer worms, viruses and spam are a few examples of how good technology was used by those with malicious intent to damage systems or steal data or money. The PC is 25 years old and there are more malicious attacks taking place now than ever.

One trend that seems to be certain is attackers generally go after critical mass.

In other words a new operating system with 0.5% market share is not a very enticing target. As more people use the new operating system hackers start to see an opportunity to do what they do best -- hack.

So if you are following me so far and you have been reading the research indicating hundreds of millions of users will soon be on IMS networks do you see an opportunity for hackers to attack. I know I do and I am not alone as a recent conversation with Sipera Systems leads me to believe the company is quite serious about minimizing hacker attacks on IMS networks.

If you are thinking about rolling out IMS or UMA you need to realize there are many risks associated with the deployment. Specifically the low cost for a malicious user to become authenticated. In this case all it takes is a prepaid ISIM card which can be purchased for less than $20. For less than $30 you can buy an ISIM card reader. From there a hacker goes to wwww.sourceforge.net and picks up the IPSec/IKEv2 Racoon2 module and Python/Pearl scripting tools. The next step is researching IMS/SIP/GPRS message formats at www.3gpp.org and then the hacker can script various flood, fuzzing and spoofing attacks. The hacker could set up multiple IPSec tunnels to various PDGs in the network or a across multiple GPRS sessions. Sipera tells me up to 10,000 messages per second of floods can be generated in this fashion and this would equal the traffic of 10 million users.

The company figures a hacker could wreak the above havoc for less than $50 and about ten days of work per attack. The damage to the service provider is not estimated by Sipera Systems but one would surmise it could easy balloon into the millions of dollars depending on how long it takes to respond and neutralize the attacker.

As you can imagine there are a number of vulnerabilities in an IMS system and Sipera has identified 20,000 of them falling into categories such as "flood" which has more than 60 types, "distributed flood" which comes in at 40+ and "misuse" which comes in at 19. In all there are 90 major classes of attacks.

Some of the more insidious attacks are stealth denial of service or DoS which could mean a constantly ringing phone or the hijacking of a handset to make phone calls which could not only rack up costs for subscribers but could reduce battery life.

Worst of all is the big brother of spam over internet protocol or SPIT. In this case it is spam over IMS which could become known as SPIM. In both cases callers receive voicemail spam as well as live call spam.

The problem with IMS security is the threat of application level attacks and Seshu Madhavapeddy, Sipera President and CEO thinks encryption and authentication are a start but you need sophisticated application-level security to keep subscribers really safe.

As you might imagine Sipera has a solution to these challenges in the form of their IPCS 510 and it is built to support 100,000 users and 10,000 simultaneous sessions. Expect the device to be ready this quarter. Contact the company for details.

If you are rolling out IMS/UMA or FMC, you must be at IMS Expo next week as the entire industry -- the most important vendors will be there for you to see. If it isn't at IMS expo it really doesn't matter in IP Multimedia Subsystem. Come hear sessions like SIP's Role in IMS, Security Issues in IMS, The Basics of IMS, Introduction to Fixed/Mobile Convergence and much more. Register now and we hope to see you in San Diego.

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