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Is Security Holding VoIP Back?
phoneboy writes "Voxilla is running a piece I wrote on security issues present in Voice over IP. While an increasing number of people are ditching their ILEC in favor of using Voice over IP from companies like Vonage, VoicePulse, Packet8, and Broadvox Direct, there are a number of potential security issues to be aware of. Is VoIP secure enough to replace the PSTN as we know it?"
Considering we've been using PSTN for about a hundred years, and we've had absolutely no security whatsoever, something based on IP should be better. There are workarounds, at least, for the lack of security in IP; there aren't as many (if any) for PSTN.
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Just look at how many unsecured wireless networks are out there. And most cordless phone users had no problem speaking of easily listenable frequencies for many years.
Whoever said PSTN was secure? All you need to sniff is a wire and the right equipment. And it's easy to do.
I don't want VoIP. Depending on the Internet for all communications (e-mail, IM, and phone) is just a bad idea.
As usual, Michael's title is misleading.
Security is not holding VOIP back.
Security is just one layer that needs to be implemented, particularly when VOIP becomes more widespread. It has very little to do with adoption- just look at how analog cellphones prospered. We all know how easy those were to listen to.
Nobody said landlines were particularly secure either. Anyone can tap a phone line or phone box for that matter and listen in on your conversations. There's few encrypted landlines around. It's also easy to listen in on cellular or wireless handsets with relatively inexpensive equipment. So for security, neither are very. If you want security you need fiber optic (VoIP or not) that measures light passing through the fiber and can detect if some of it is being diverted to listen in. Only the military and the Illuminati needs something like that.
What landlines ARE, though, are more reliable. I don't want to have my VoIP phone crash on me or have packet loss when I'm trying to call 911 because of a heart attack. You don't get two chances at that to call again, reboot, or whatever.
I think the main thing holding VOIP back is the Baby Bells, who have a lot to lose if they keep pushing it. SO it's up to the startups like Vonage to publicize the benefits and the low cost. Unfortunately that will take a LONG time as people just don't know about it.
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regular phone service is secure (and does not need encryption) since the network it is using is considered secure. Climping up on phone poles is not only a lot of work, but gets you easily arrested as well.
On the internet on the other hand, you can take your pick of about 500k ready to use backdoored hosts at any day. Just pick one close enough to your target. If you are desperate, buy one of the routers in the path on IRC for a few stolen CC numbers.
What we need is a simple and fast encryption method for VoIP. Similar to the phone network, it doesn't have to be 'Fed prove'. This may make it possible to come up with something simple that will not cause excessive latency.
Of course, one issue with VoIP is that its kind of stretching the limits of current infrastructure. So any added overhead may break it.
---- join dshield.org Distributed Intrusion Detec
What annoys me the most is that cell phones still are not treated as "normal" phones by the key places where it matters, such as credit cards, etc. If I pay a monthly bill on a cell phone, and I need a positive credit rating to even get that service plan in the first place, why is that not good enough to establish credit? It annoys me that even though it seems like something that has been overlooked, it also looks like we're just giving extra business to land-line providers. I have no need for such a telephone line, but I will probably have to get one the next time I move as it still is a requirement for many things.
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Security is just one of the issues why VoIP has not caught on as an end user technology:
Pricing People think that VoIP is cheap compared to normal telephony. Average people spend around USD 200 per year on land line telephony. While VoIP might seam "free" you still have to pay around USD 300 for an ADSL connection.
Device type While it is technically feasible to install a VoIP client on a PC, it is not exactly the ideal device for a telephone. Also - remember that people usually have several phones in the house. To overcome this you would need VoIP "telephones" which look like a normal telephone. These are reletive expensive compared to normal phones, and requires a dedicated power supply.
Incoming calls In order to receive incoming calls you need to have you VoIP device turned on all the time and connected to the Internet.
Availability A normal landline telephone is usually available 99.98 % of the time. If your ADSL reaches 99.7% you should consider yourself lucky. Furthermore normal phones work during power outages. In some countries this is a regulatory requirement for emergency services.
Billing It would be nice if it was possible to make "free" VoIP calls. In most of the world however, it is the calling party who pays for the call. This means that a VoIP call terminated at a Spanish GSM phone will be charged backwards: The spanish GSM operator charges the VoIP "operator" for "terminating" the call, and the VoIP operator subsequently charges the VoIP "customer". The world has more than 1 billion GSM subscribers. In order to be able to call these you need the billing infrastructure in place even for VoIP. This requirement makes VoIP just as expensive to produce as traditional telephony.
Only a land line solution The world is moving voice calls to mobile phones. So far it has not been shown that VoIP is technically or economically feasible on mobile phones?
Quality It is pretty hard to beat the delay characteristics of a normal landline phone! VoIP has severe delay problems on thin access lines such as ADSL. Usually OK for 2Mb/s and up.
After all VoIP is only a matter of changing layer 3 and 4 in the protocol stack. Why would end customers care?
The places where VoIP is used today it is mostly invisible to the end-user: It is used as a cost cutting technology by a large number of long distance carriers. The service however is sold as normal "high quality" telephony. It is also used in a corporate setting for branch-to-branch calls as well as for PABX replacements. VoIP also makes a lot of sense sense as computer-telephony-integration in call centers.
The next majer breakthrough for VoIP will be VoADSL. VoIP all the way to the customer premises. The interface to the customer however will be a normal POTS jack, full customer service and the associated billing!
First of all, if VOIP is supposed to be less secure, what is it less secure than? Less secure than telco service? That doesn't really make sense, because essentially all the people who I call and who call me have telco service. There's no such thing as a 'VOIP call' or a 'telco call.' If you stay with the telco because you think it's more secure, and then you call me, guess what -- your call went through my VOIP provider, so you're not any more secure. Likewise if I got a VOIP box that did encryption on the voice data, it still wouldn't guarantee my security if the person I was calling was using an unencrypted wireless connection on their end. And BTW, even if you're a telco customer calling another telco customer, many of your calls probably go through the internet on part of their journey.
It's also not clear to me what real problems they're claiming the lack of security would cause. The beginning of the article seems to imply that the threat is unreliability due to attacks by hackers. Well, that just isn't the real reliability issue faced by actual VOIP users. The only real reliability issue I've encountered is that when my cable modem service isn't working, my phone stops working. (But so far it's always cured the problem if I just power cycle the cable modem.) It's also worth noting that one of the main reasons we switched from telco to VOIP was the poor reliability of the telco service. We went through a period of about two weeks recently where there were telco guys working continuously all up and down the street, all our neighbors had no telco service (or patchy telco service), and we were the only ones on the block who could actually make a phone call. According to the telco worker I talked to (the big green box is right in front of my house), the issue is just that the equipment is getting really old.
They also seem to imply that there's some sort of a threat of identity theft, or that someone may steal your service. Well frankly, I'm taking a bigger risk every time I let a waiter in a restaurant see my credit card number.
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