Threats and Methods to Secure a VoIP Network Essay

Threats and Methods to Secure a VoIP Network - Essay Example People were mostly concerned with its cost, functionality and reliability. Today, VoIP is growing to the point where companies of almost any size in any industry know how to take advantage of the cost savings and other emerging added features in VoIP. As VOIP is gaining wide acceptance and becoming one of the mainstream communication technologies, security has become a major issue. Network Administrators are finding themselves in a tough position of providing their clienteles with the security and reliability that they have grown accustomed to over these years. The threats to security and privacy could be in the form of DOS (denial of service), malformed messages, sniffing, spoofing, vishing, VOIP spam and SPIT (spam over VOIP). The vulnerable components under threat through the use of VoIP could be access device application, management interface, network, tftp server. Means to secure the VOIP network could be VoIP Protocol, Session Border Protocol, or using the network devices. To protect networks from these threats, one of the key aspects is the methodology of securing information; that is, to conceal the signals and media in real time communications from unauthorized entities through cryptography. But there is no single solution to secure a VOIP service network entirely the best practice is to integrate all possible solutions according to service model, network architecture, protocol model, target customers, peering partners and so on. With increasing use of this technology combined with modern technology and its users, VoIP faces many security issues that need to be covered and prevented in order to make this technology as one of the best for the companies. Therefore this dissertation will examine some security concerns and protection methods by analyzing the threats to VoIP network and consequently determine how to deal with them from design, quality of service and management perspectives. 1.2 Introduction As with IT security, there are a multitude of threats to a VoIP network that can make it difficult to secure VoIP telephony. DoS attacks, message tampering, proxy impersonation, registration hijacking are but a few of the problems telephony managers may encounter as they try to secure VoIP networks. The security of private data, whether in organizations or industries, is becoming more crucial and relevant each day. VOIP technology also needs to continually improve and update its security defenses in terms of reliability and quality. As internet telephony comes to handle more data, it becomes an easy target for cyber crime. From the beginning of its inception, VOIP infrastructure has always been vulnerable to threats from other networked architectures. This happens due to the process of digitization, and encryption of voice, which is then compressed into small packets and sent over the Internet Protocol network systems. This technicality is presented in the VOIP system which can