Internet protocol and VoIP security - Essay Example

Further in this dissertation we will identify strengths and weaknesses in VoIP and acknowledging areas suitable for further development. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) in simple words would be transmission of voice signal over internet such as SIP and H.323. There are a lots of other protocols which are used in VoIP technology such as UDP etc., but I think the most important of all would be SIP. This is because SIP is used by VoIP for establishing and terminating a session. So as we said SIP handles the setup, modification and responsible for ending a session between two terminals, these can be transmitted over internet using either UDP or TCP.H.323 is the standard for using audio-video protocol over the internet.

It comes recommended by ITU (International Telecommunications Union). http://www.itu.int/net/home/index.aspx . VoIP is emerging as a new technology and becoming very popular. Even with this popularity VoIP has serious issues that need to be looked into. One is QoS and the other is Security. QoS is an important issue because IP was never designed to carry real time content such as voice. ( Lima et.al 2006)SIP is also an important factor of VoIP because as we know SIP stands for Session internet protocol.

SIP are used for authentication create or terminate calls. SIP calls can be either established over UDP or TCP protocols. Improving security directly effects QoS. Security may also be enhanced by AES (Advance Encryption standard) is capable of using cryptographic keys of 128, 192, and 256 bits to encrypt and decrypt data in blocks of 128 bits. (CSRC 2001) Based on my research and as stated by Carrole Bassil et al in "Critical VPN Security Analysis and New Approach for Securing VoIP Communications over VPN Networks" the best security is Virtual private network (VPN) and the most VPN solution for tunneling.

VPN are created using encryption, authentication and tunneling. The basic idea behind using VPN is to have a secure network from point-to-point. VPN certainly increase the security but encryption will cause delays in VoIP, therefore the solution would be to have some kind of SLA (service level agreement) implemented in the network which can be achieved by MPLS.During my research for VoIP it was observed that a lot of works has been done from the prospective of securing the network such as using firewalls, or improving the encryption etc, but there was no attempt of securing the network and maintaining the QoS at the same time.

According to Fernando Manchini Serenato and Juergen Rochol in future telecom and data network will be integrated into one and in this situation it will be important to maintain QoS. Presently most of the internet infrastructure supports only best effort service which means there are no guarantees if the information will be delivered. In this specific and many other articles MPLS has been discussed in general and have not been specifically used for VoIP. The major part of this project would be where I will design a solution to secure the VoIP network using IPsec tunnel, and MPLS for managing the QoS.

The solution I will propose is traffic engineering with MPLS, because it plays a major role IP Network by delivering QoS as well as traffic engineering features. Manchini Serenato and Juergen Rochol believe that MPLS will very soon will be adopted in all network because different QoS of services can be implemented such as