Evaluation of and Mitigation against Malicious Traffic in SIP-based VoIP Applications in a Broadband Internet Environment

Voice Over IP (VoIP) telephony is becoming widespread, and is often integrated into computer networks. Because of his, it is likely that malicious software will threaten VoIP systems the same way traditional computer systems have been attacked by viruses, worms, and other automated agents. While most users have become familiar with email spam and viruses in email attachments, spam and malicious traffic over telephony currently is a relatively unknown threat. VoIP networks are a challenge to secure against such malware as much of the network intelligence is focused on the edge devices and access environment. A novel security architecture is being developed which improves the security of a large VoIP network with many inexperienced users, such as non-IT office workers or telecommunication service customers. The new architecture establishes interaction between the VoIP backend and the end users, thus providing information about ongoing and unknown attacks to all users. An evaluation of the effectiveness and performance of different implementations of this architecture is done using virtual machines and network simulation software to emulate vulnerable clients and servers through providing apparent attack vectors