VoIP over IPsec

Tue Feb 18 18:25:41 UTC 2003

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tedawson at attbi.com [mailto:tedawson at attbi.com]
> 
> Comments inline:
> At 01:34 PM 2/17/2003 -0500, Charles Youse wrote:
> 
> >So do you suppose that in my scenario, I'd be better off 
> leaving the VoIP out 
> >of the encrypted tunnels and use a separate [cleartext] path 
> for them?
> 
> Oh goodness no. VoIP (SIP specifically) has no real security 
> in it. Call 
> hijacking for example is a matter of sending a pair of 
> spoofed UDP packets to 
> each phone and having the voice streams arrive at the 
> attackers machine. Not 
> pretty, and I do this trick (and worse) daily. (in a lab as 
> part of work of 
> course)

What about sips:/TLS, S/MIME, and digest auth? These are all integral to the 'standard', and many popular implementations support these facilities currently. 

IPSec may be less painful within a single domain, but in other cases, I'd think that these facilities (or their derivatives) are the only practical option for 'real' security. Granted it is all pretty worthless if you dont enable/use any of it... Am I missing something?

Regards,
Andrew Bender
taqua.com