End-to-middle-to-end solution for IMS media plane security

Abstract IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) is becoming the prevailing candidate for managing future mobile multimedia communications, including critical communications such as public safety, emergency professionals and corporate networks. IMS security and privacy has gained much attention in the few last years. The review of recent IMS security activities stresses the inclusion of intermediate nodes in the media path of secured communications as an open issue. This paper presents an endto-middle-to-endsolutionwhichenablestheusageofIMSmediaplaneelementssuch asrecorders,transcodersandnovelcross-cipheringfunctionsinasecureway.Theproposed solution, which is fullycompliant withIMS, includes the network architecture, the signaling plane for session signaling and key management, and the media-plane security characteristics. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution can provide media interoperability (both transcoding and cross-ciphering) with a cost of 17 % overhead to a standard IMS call setup in the signaling plane