VoIP Gets a New P2P Routing Protocol (DUNDi)

bkw.org writes "Today Digium released DUNDi which can be used with the Asterisk Open Source PBX for p2p call routing. Digum has also released a whitepaper (pdf) on DUNDi so others can implement this new technology into their products and give VoIP a push into the mainstream." Voxilla also has a story.

Comments

P2P VOIP

[stanmann]

Great, Now I can get telemarketers trying to enlarge my bank software in nigeria, and viruses on my VOIP line and in my e-mail

Re:P2P VOIP

[kasparov]

Actually, if you read the white-paper, it has built in ways to mark subscribers as unavailable for unsolicited or unsolicited commercial calls. If a peer violates this, they are legally liable to *all* peers. (if I read it right).

Another great move

[salemnic]

* is awesome, and for anyone who hasn't given it a shot, I definitely recommend it. Digium even sells some FXS/FXO cards if you want it to replace your traditional in-house system.

Something neat for every geek!

s.

Re:Another great move

[ZX81]

Yep definately agree Digium rocks.

You can find more information about Dundi here:

http://www.sineapps.com/news.php?rssid=240

Is this a...

[davidsyes]

--crock
--crocodile
--crock o' dial
--dun deal

OK, cold & dumb...lame attempts at humor

Re:Is this a...

[mishehu]

Actually, in the words of kram (aka Mark Spencer of Digium), it's a "grok-a-dial..."

Guess he wants to compete with Sharman Networks AND groklaw. ;-)

Re:Is this a...

[MagicHateBall]

Nah, it's a CrocoStimpy! http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageServ let/showid-3536/epid-56644/

Before everyone says...

[einhverfr]

What do we need this for? Don't we have enough protocols?

This is actually pretty cool from a distributed PBX perspective. I am not sure I would want to use it over the internet with untrusted PBX's but it would be pretty useful inside a large corporate structure.

The New Baby Bells

[I Hate Spam Alot]

Wonder if this will sping up into localized phone services like wifi and cheap fiber based internet did for small towns. The whole town chips in and gets to kick out the big corp. and run the local service as the citizan see fit. Plus it will be cool to run in my house!

Cool

[LittLe3Lue]

Maybe soon I'll be able to call l33tMovieRipper over xyz P2Pclient and ask for The Matrix in person.

>

Re:Cool

[spoonyfork]

Maybe soon I'll be able to call l33tMovieRipper over xyz P2Pclient and ask for The Matrix in person.

You haven't seen it yet?

I guess this fits in with what I don't understand about possessing entertainment media like movies and books. Once I've seen/read it, I don't need it anymore. Movies are seen in theaters or rented on DVD. Books are borrowed or purchased then donated to the local public library. I don't understand this type of consumerism media hoarding.

Re:Cool

[balloonpup]

Quite simply, because very often movies exit from the theaters and video rental places get rid of most if not all of their copies of the movies. What if you want to see a movie that's not /at/ your video store again?

Will Hatch ban VoIP?

[grunt107]

Given that Orrin wants all P2P technology banned, would this be terminated as well if he succeeds?

Or does this give P2P the legitimacy it needs to exists.

I vote the latter but I am biased for P2P tech anyway.

Re:Will Hatch ban VoIP?

[networkBoy]

" Given that Orrin wants all P2P technology banned, would this be terminated as well if he succeeds?
Or does this give P2P the legitimacy it needs to exists."

This is the first app to give P2P legitimacy.
If corps start using it over VPNs to connect branch/remote locations to the main office then P2P is here to stay as they will buy Hach's opinion.
-nB

Re:Will Hatch ban VoIP?

[Stween]

This is the first app to give P2P legitimacy.

... Usenet, 1979, anyone?

Peer-to-peer technology has been around and has been in common usage for many, many years. I can't name any well known peer-to-peer systems before 1979, but I'm quite sure there were some.

P2P had legitimacy long before illegal file sharing came along.

Javasterisk?

[Doc Ruby]

Who's running a Java app server controlling their Asterisk PBX, or being controlled by it?

Re:Javasterisk?

[abigor]

I read about this on the Asterisk mailing list:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jasterisk/

Of course, you'd have to layer your EJBs/servlets/whathaveyou on top, but hey, it's a start. And it gets you away from the horrible Asterisk Manager interface.

Re:Javasterisk?

[Anonymous Coward]

you can also use http://asterisk-java.sf.net that wraps the manager api and makes it accessible from java.

Language trivia of the day

[Anonymous Coward]

dundi means chubby in Hungarian.

Re:Language trivia of the day

[Anonymous Coward]

In Hungarian is it pronounced similar to the name of the ultra 80's cool knife totting bush cowboy from down under or is it pronounced more like "doondi"?

Re:Language trivia of the day

[Anonymous Coward]

dundi means stick in Hindi

Re:Language trivia of the day

[kiscica]

More like "doondi," but the "oo" is short.

Here come the security problems.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Remember when closing off your email servers from open relaying was a skill that not everyone had a grasp of? Here we go again. While I do agree that VoIP inevitably requires more advanced routing, it is my fear that this will be abused for a long time until admins become skilled in the art of preventing unwanted forwards. In the meantime, you'll have...

• Skript kiddiez abusing it to go VoIP-to-landline on someone else's nickel (oh yes, the days of phreaking are coming back)
• Bulk dialers. You thought telemarketers were bad? Wait until the spammers get a hold of free calls to your home!

I fear for the future... :)

Re:Here come the security problems.

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the GPA. These issues are addressed, specifically in section 2, the acceptable use policy.

Re:Here come the security problems.

[Spoing]

1. While I do agree that VoIP inevitably requires more advanced routing, it is my fear that this will be abused for a long time until admins become skilled in the art of preventing unwanted forwards.

I'm even more of a pesimist (aka realist).

Yesterday's security issues have not even been addressed today.

It all boils down to how much pain someone feels at this moment in time.

That's why viruses and spyware are seen as the primary security issues, while system security itself -- something that would eliminate these and other problems -- is considered esoteric or impractical. If a security hole silently allows someone to abuse your systems and the data on it...out of sight, out of mind. If the system becomes slow or unstable, then it becomes 'a problem' that some package or product should 'fix'.

Sure, there are admins that don't think like this -- and I hope that includes whoever reads this -- though the rule still holds in general. The bad guys have lots of low hanging fruit to pick from.

Re:Well this doesn't seem very good

[fugginsuds]

I don't think p2p is the "worst possible way". Underwater with a tin can and string is a pretty bad way to start a conversation.

encryption? wiretap?

[r00t]

P2P changes things. The FBI might not like this.

Number assignment is an issue too, unless you
can dial a "number" that looks like an email
address or a URL.

Re:encryption? wiretap?

[Anonymous Coward]

The FBI??? Who cares. If they come to my door I'll tell them to get lost or I'll have to cops arrest them. They have no business in Canada anyway :)

Uninformative intro again...

[The Famous Brett Wat]

DUNDi stands for "Distributed Universal Number Discovery". It is a peer to peer system for locating Internet gateways to telephony services. Unlike traditional centralized services (such as ENUM), DUNDi is fully distributed, with no central authority. DUNDi is not a Voice over IP signalling or media protocol: it publishes routes which are in turn accessed via industry standard protocols such as IAX, SIP and H.323.

The above information is taken (with minor edits) from the dundi.com website. It's the sort of information that would have been useful in the executive summary, IMHO.

Re:Uninformative intro again...

[narsiman]

If this protocol was a corc, would it be called the crocodile DUNDi.

Re:Uninformative intro again...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the sort of information that would have been useful in the executive summary, IMHO.

But then how will people be able to get +5 informative by paraphrasing the article in a comment? :)

CALLEA Anyone

[GoodNicsTken]

This is exactly why the VoIP providers should not be required to provide a voice stream back to the softswitch. The criminals will start using something like this.

In the mmean time the VoIP industry will spend billions on upgrades (All passed on to the consumer) to provide the FBI a tap that is so easily defeated.

Wtite the FCC about this. Get involved, join the EFF!

Re:Well this doesn't seem very good

[MacJedi]

Your history lesson is sound for P2P file sharing. Economic pressures can result in some nice innovation, eh?

However, as far as telephony goes, P2P makes sense as well. If you want to use the client-server model, you need, well, a server. Netmeeting for example requires this-- you connect to a server which handles directory info. A P2P VOIP network could decentralize this.

Re:Is this a...Well Pamela is doing FINE

[davidsyes]

with GROKlaw, but her peers and seniors are still mostly practicing...

CROCKlaw

DOH!!!!

Skype is P2P VOIP too.

[lullabud]

Skype is considered P2P and it's a plenty legitimate application, and it uses standard SIP for it's protocol. Being that SIP is a widely used protocol I'd think that it would hold the precedence in most legitimate P2P VOIP app.

Re:Skype is P2P VOIP too.

[lga]

Skype doesn't doesn't communicate with any standard SIP service, I don't think it uses SIP at all. It uses their own proprietry protocol encrypted with AES.

Re:Skype is P2P VOIP too.

[lullabud]

Oh man, you're totally right. I don't know what I was thinking... You're right though, Skype does use a proprietary encrypted protocol.

Question

[chia_monkey]

So if I get one rating as "-1 Troll", and another as "-1 Overrated", shouldn't I be back to zero? I tell ya, there's nothing worse than being an Overrated Troll. Ha!

so....

[LiquidMind]

it seems that DUNDi is now a 'done deal'. get it!?!?

HA!

...2 minutes after this post my karma changed to 'throw yourself out the nearest window'

Where does the trust build from?

[CharlieHedlin]

It seems to me that the enum standard should work, and that this requires too much trust building.
In the case of a corporate PBX, couldn't enum be used with distributed redundant DNS servers?

I use Asterisk, it is great, and I like the idea of DUNDI, but by the time you get a web of trust built, why not just use enum?

Re:Where does the trust build from?

[Gaewyn L Knight]

Easy answer... ENUM requires that you trust a central body in control of the use of your records. Havn't we all learned from DNS and Verisign?

Re:Where does the trust build from?

[Scott Laird]

Well, look at things this way: ENUM has been around for *years*, yet there's still no official ENUM tree. There's no way for VoIP carriers like Vonage to publish SIP addresses for the PSTN numbers that they service.

Why? Because of political squabbling by telcos, verisign, and the like. Whoever controls the ENUM tree will be able to control the future of telecommunications. That means money and power, and that's why there's no progress occuring--all of the usual players are jockeying for position, and will be for years.

Since ENUM is really just a DNS tree, that hasn't stopped people from producing their own ENUM trees (e164.org, etc), but there's nothing particularly official about any of them. They're all interim solutions, and none of them are big enough to be able to make a difference on their own.

There are a couple differences with DUNDi. First, it's *designed* to be decentralized, without a single point of control (or toll collection). There's an open-source implementation right out of the gate. It at least pays lip service to spam and telemarketing issues. As long as you sign the agreement, it *should* be possible for anyone to participate. And, it already has several mid-sized providers involved.

In short, right out of the gate, DUNDi is already ahead of ENUM, because it's already usable, while ENUM still doesn't have any way to publish numbers in the "official" e164.arpa tree. DUNDi doesn't have room for Verisign-style toll collection, while the official ENUM tree almost requires it.

We'll see how it goes. If Vonage joins up, then DUNDi has probably won and ENUM will end up being irrelevant, because the network effect will strongly favor DUNDi.

That's how SIP to SIP calls are done...

[Svartalf]

You place a call request to one presence server that has a given URI for the person you're wanting to call, including their ID on the server. From there your SIP endpoint software does the rest, including calling landline endpoints.

An example would be:

sip:foo@mysipserver.net

Another would be:

sip:18005551212@mysipserver.net

In the first case, you're calling directly to another SIP endpoint. In the second, you could be calling a SIP endpoint or a PSTN terminated endpoint- the URI wouldn't matter.

At first glance

[Cyclone_TBW]

It looks like it will help with some of the QoS issue. For a large company that routes calls between offices you could have it do a constant line quality test so if packets are dropping down one path it would route to another machine on the fly to keep the Qos up.

Gaining Legitimacy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's good to see Asterisk gaining some legitimacy. So far it has been treated like a plaything. It doesn't help that services like the Caller ID spoofing site http://www.camophone.com/ are using Asterisk.

Re:Gaining Legitimacy

[daveschroeder]

This site is a scam, fyi. So don't sign up for it, anyone who might be reading this.

Skype

[Deliveranc3]

Any kind of interoperability with Skype?

Re:Skype

[DarthBart]

No. Skype is still as proprietary and closed source as ever.

Re:Skype

[Deliveranc3]

Um isn't it open source? I mean I got it from sourceforge.

Re:Skype

[davidkv]

No. Skype isn't on Sourceforge.

Looks Like DNS

[trinity93]

Is this just like dns except a phone number to ip mapping? It sure seems to look that way. you could have just intergrated something like this into bind and been done with it. call it a PHONE record or PBX record. Why does It have to be so complicated?

Re:Looks Like DNS

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I agree. I think it was just another case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome. GPL advocates seem to suffer from it more than others.

Re:Looks Like DNS

[llefler]

DNS isn't enough, since a lot of ISPs won't assign static IPs. But for a DDNS system, it sounds so simple you have to wonder why no one has done it.

I personally could care less about calling landlines from a VOIP phone. I don't use all my cell minutes. But a free directory of VOIP numbers would be nice. This is something that people should jump on now and get standardized before we get more VOIP directories than IM services.

Re:Well this doesn't seem very good

[ZX81]

This new protocol is not for peer to peer voice communication. It's a method like a phone book. So you ask your peers if they know how to contact person X, your peers contact their peers and so on until they find the address of a person (for example the IAX/SIP/OpenH.323 address). Then the address is passed back though the peers to the original person doing the lookup, and is cached along the way.

You then make your telephone call using VOIP. The IAX (Inter Asterisk Exchange) protocol is amazing at getting though NAT'd connections etc. It can even trunk lots of calls together into one packet.

So in a nutshell, this is like a p2p enum.

Another link

[ZX81]

Here's another URL to a story on DUNDi:

http://voxilla.com/voxstory107-nested-order0-thr es hold0.html

Excerpt:

Asterisk Guru May Have Solved Interconnection Dilemna

What has been a longtime complaint of many VoIP users - the limited ability of users on separate IP networks to call each other over a direct IP-to-IP connection - may well be addressed through a new number discovery protocol developed by Mark Spencer, the lead architect behind the highly regarded open source PBX system, Asterisk.

Skype is now Obsolete

[Bob_Robertson]

And they did it to themselves.

1: Skype uses proprietary protocols that are incompatible with any other service.

2: Skype refuses to publish their interface profiles, so no one else can make software that is compatible.

3: Skype has stated in no uncertain terms, over and over on their web page and FAQ, that they will never publish their API, never open their source. Period.

Yet Skype doesn't sell their software. They maintain the full burden of development and testing, and try to pay for it by selling the service of POTS calls made through their software.

Oh well, once the idea is in the wild, someone will "open source" it. Maybe someone will adapt the Speak Freely user interface to a P2P transport layer, maybe utilizing the Gnutella network itself? Hey, this is sounding like a good idea....

Bob-

Digum?

[freeze128]

Did he say Digum? I vaguely remember some sort of sugar smacks frog saying that....

Dynamic IP Addressing

[Junior Samples]

Most cable systems use dynamic IP addressing. Will DUNDI accommodate this?

I presently access Free World Dialup through a conventional phone connected to the internet through a Sipura box that uses SIP protocol. The box connects to the FWD server to establish the peer to peer connection.

The FWD server method works very well, but it's not that reliable. When the server is down, you can't dial out. An easy method of direct dialing without a dedicated server is needed.

The Sipura box is also capable of direct IP to IP dialing, but it's very cumbersome to dial this way. So far, we haven't been successful with direct IP dialing. A better solution is needed. DUNDI may be the answer, but the white paper failed to mention if and how DUNDI would work in a dynamic address environment.

It.Slashdot.Org Gets a New Colour Protocol

[Anonymous Coward]

http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/19/1 659240

Skype and Standards and Alternatives

[billstewart]

Skype prefers to do things that are "better" than the current standards, and does them in a proprietary way to protect their potential profits, and doesn't document their protocols because they're not interested in having random people develop software that interconnects with them. (Make whatever judgements you'd like about that... :-) However, unlike many vendors who take that approach, they've at least done a decent job of it.

• They're using audio codecs from Global Ip Sound, who make codecs that are more tolerant of high packet loss than most of the low-bit-rate public-standard codecs, and also better-than-telco-quality higher-bandwidth codecs. It looks like Global IP is working on getting some of their codecs into the standards track.
• They view NAT traversal as a critical design element, because NAT's become extremely widespread (in spite of being evil breakage of the end-to-end paradigm), so they've done more than the SIP standards do to simplify that. (SIP came from Internet people, so it was far, far better than the H.323 stuff that came from the ISDN crowd, and it's easy to set up firewalls for SIP transparency, but NAT traversal takes extra work.)
• They view security as a critical requirement, so they've got modern crypto algorithms like AES in there, and from a performance standpoint it's a really big win to encrypt the data packets rather than using IPSEC tunnels, because VOIP data is inherently small compared to the headers. Unfortunately, because of their attitudes about proprietariness and no public documentation, it's not possible for the crypto community to examine their protocols or code, and most crypto mistakes these days are made in protocol implementations, not in the fundamental algorithms, so even though they use AES and Diffie-Hellmann and long enough keys, that doesn't mean they're not totally hosed.
• P2P is fun, and can scale well by taking load off the central server, and the Skype folks don't want to run a huge central server. This has some conveniences for their design (supernodes for NAT traversal assistance, etc.), and creates some interesting security tradeoffs (no central point of attack, but widely distributed local attack points) which are unfortunately covered up by the lack of protocol documentation.

How affordable?

[Mustang Matt]

How cheaply can a home system be completed?

I'm very interested but in the past it didn't seem like it was cost effective.

Re:How affordable?

[balloonpup]

Just built one for:

$200 for the FXO and FXS
and 1 recycled PII-450.

Pretty cheap, if you ask me.

Re:How affordable?

[salemnic]

You can use any decent recycled PC for the * server. I'm running a Duron 850 with 256MB RAM, but I understand even slower will work.

There are actually a couple of ways of doing it. You can use something like Voicepulse Connect and for $8 per month for an incoming number (48 states) and/or about $.03 a minute get calling anywhere in the USA or Canada. Even outbound local numbers cost this way, though.

The other option is to buy a digium fxs/fxo card and plug into the regular PSTN. The card can run as little as $150, I believe. Check out Digium for more info there.

A good way to get cheap long distance (at less than $.03 a minute) is to go with * and use the PSTN and Voicepulse connect (it is only a setting or two to make * do the differentiation). You route the local calls through the PSTN, and the long distance ones through Voicepulse connect. It depends, of course, on how much calling you do.

One caveat - VOIP and 911 emergency do not go well together.

Cheers,

s.

Maybe not

[Wesley Felter]

DUNDi and Skype are both P2P, but otherwise they are quite different. Skype uses supernodes to get through NATs; I don't think DUNDi even tries. Skype is designed to connect a huge number of PCs/phones; DUNDi looks like it's more of a server-to-server protocol (can it scale to millions of peers?). Skype users are mostly anonymous; DUNDi requires peers to negotiate contractual relationships.

And I can't resist picking on this...

Maybe someone will adapt the Speak Freely user interface to a P2P transport layer, maybe utilizing the Gnutella network itself?

Yeah, let's combine an obsolete, non-standards-compliant VoIP app with the least efficient P2P system available.

Hungarians won't like it much

[Anonymous Coward]

According to this online dictionary (http://dict.sztaki.hu/english-hungarian), "dundi" means "crummy" in hungarian.

In any other language, however, it looks like a fantastic idea. Way to go Mark Spencer and Digium!

Re:Hungarians won't like it much

[kiscica]

Just goes to show that the SzTAKI dictionary (which is built on user contributions, not by professional lexicographers) isn't perfect. "dundi" doesn't mean 'crummy' under any possible interpretation of that word. It means 'fat' (applied e.g. to a person, or animal - I met a cat named Dundi once). A more nuanced translation would be 'chubby' or 'plump.'

By the way, the Hungarian equivalents given by the SzTAKI dictionary for the English word "crummy" all mean 'rich,' 'chubby,' or 'pretty.' Strangely, the actual meaning of the word ('of poor quality') is not reflected by any of the definitions.

SzTAKI's dictionary is a great resource but its entries, especially for more colloquial words such as this, should be taken cum grano salis!

Kiscica

RTFA

[lorcha]

From TFA:

DUNDi is not itself a Voice over IP signalling or media protocol. Instead, it publishes routes which are in turn accessed via industry standard protocols such as IAX(TM), SIP and H.323.

No one is going to be spam-calling you through DUNDi. It's basically a distributed "white pages" with no single point of failure.

Hell, you couldn't even be bothered to read the name before sticking your foot in your mouth. DUNDi stands for "Distributed Universal Number Discovery".