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An Empirical Investigation into the Security of Phone Features in SIP-Based VoIP Systems

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 5451))

Abstract

Phone features, e.g., 911 call, voicemail, and Do Not Disturb, are critical and necessary for all deployed VoIP systems. In this paper, we empirically investigate the security of these phone features. We have implemented a number of attacks and experimented with VoIP services by leading VoIP service providers Vonage, AT&T and Gizmo. Our experimental results demonstrate that a man-in-the-middle or remote attacker could transparently 1) hijack selected E911 calls and impersonate the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP); and 2) spoof the voicemail servers of both the caller and the callee of selected VoIP calls; and 3) make spam calls to VoIP subscribers even if Do Not Disturb is enabled. These empirical results confirm that leading deployed SIP-based VoIP systems have serious security vulnerabilities.

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Zhang, R., Wang, X., Yang, X., Farley, R., Jiang, X. (2009). An Empirical Investigation into the Security of Phone Features in SIP-Based VoIP Systems. In: Bao, F., Li, H., Wang, G. (eds) Information Security Practice and Experience. ISPEC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5451. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00843-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00843-6_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00842-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00843-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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