| If the problem is about VoIP.. |
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| Thursday, 30 November 2006 | ||||
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As the Register reported, according to a study published by the security company Scanit it is quite easy to hack customers’ private data by wiretapping. Two main kinds of attacks were identified: Signalling attacks and Media Stream attacks. Let’s consider the first group at the moment: The team that drew up such study, based tests on a SIP router (that router mostly widespread among VoIP providers) and tried to carry out a call hijacking. SIP protocols do not still support message integrity, so that it is quite easy to re-direct them back to the proxy or to SIP register and make it perform functions such as re-routing a call. We know that in a typical SIP register message a client announce itself to a SIP register. The SIP register verifies then the client’s location and its state (that is if it can accept a call or not). Once the call is placed, the SIP proxy will perform a lookup to check the location of the client , for example checking the correspondence between a phone number and a IP address. This information could be easily sniffed by an attacker, that could then modify it and re-send it to the SIP register. The result would be that , from that moment on, any call made to the concerned number will be routed to an IP Address which is different from the original one. About Media Stream attacks instead, the first thing to say is that they are very easy to carry out in a typical VoIP implementation. In this case, data is sent through the Real-Time Transport protocol, which is a UDP based protocol that streams voice data from one IP to another . Normally, voice data transmitted by RTP aren’t encrypted so that in case of eavesdropping, information can be easily decoded and the conversation can be listened to or recorded. As demonstrated by the researchers, the higher risk conveyed by Media stream attack concerns data injection. Such situation could happen for instance in a situation where an attacker replays a message to enter a PIN code and then captures the related touch tones that he can use later on. In spite of the high level of risks conveyed by VoIP, companies are still too vulnerable to the attackers’ action because security measures are often thought to have been already set up by VoIP vendors on the network, and no further measure is taken to protect VoIp connections. The research pointed out an impressive lack of awareness about the risks brought about VoIp technology, that , as most of us know, is among the main causes of data breaches and security leaks. And considering the number of data theft that are currently happening, both companies and people should ask themselves if they can afford it.
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