I recently learned that Intoto is working on some reference designs with AT&T that are pretty intriguing. In case you aren't familiar with Intoto, they are an ODM or original design manufacturer supplying OEMs and service providers with designs. From a time to market standpoint Intoto allows you to get your products out more quickly than if you wanted to deal with software stacks and other building blocks yourself.

The company is in the VoIP and wireless spaces and they are specialists in security.

Intoto is intriguing to me because they are working with AT&T on a business class VoIP device. The device includes provisioning technology based on a protocol named TLS or transport layer security. TLS is protocol independent and is made up of a record protocol that can travel over TCP and a handshake protocol that allows authentication between the client and server.

One of the important issues that came up in my conversation is that VoIP is insecure at the moment and a business class service will likely want more security than is readily available. For this reason, their device will have an IKEv2 based VPN tunnel to the AT&T softswitch. IKEv2 is the latest IETF attempt at consolidating VPN technology. The device will also by the way have four ports, WiFi and branch to branch tunneling ability. They are also working on a secure WiFi telephony handset which will of course include the Intoto sip stack and their patented stateful call processor.

Another interesting design feat is the ability for Intoto reference designs to be a dual mode handset (WiFi telephony and GSM) device that uses the EAP SIM authentication mechanism found in GSM to seamlessly interoperate with both WiFi and GSM networks.

Why this is important? As VoIP subsystems become more secure, so do VoIP products and services. As a supplier to such a broad range of companies Intoto's advancements are our industry's gain.