Abusing SIP authentication

Humberto Abdelnur (1) , Tigran Avanesov (2) , Michael Rusinowitch (2) , Radu State (1, 3)

1 MADYNES - Management of dynamic networks and services
2 CASSIS - Combination of approaches to the security of infinite states systems
3 FSTC - Faculté des Sciences, de la Technologie et de la Communication

The recent and massive deployment of Voice over IP infrastructures had raised the importance of the VoIP security and more precisely of the underlying signalisation protocol SIP. In this paper, we will present a new attack against the authentication mechanism of SIP. This attack allows to perform toll fraud and call hijacking. We will detail the formal specification method that allowed to detect this vulnerability, highlight a simple usage case and propose a mitigation technique.

Mots clés: Security threat; VoIP; SIP protocol; authentication; formal validation; AVISPA

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]; Calcul formel [cs.SC]; Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Humberto Abdelnur, Tigran Avanesov, Michael Rusinowitch, Radu State. Abusing SIP authentication. Journal of Information Assurance and Security, 2009, Special Issue on Access Control and Protcols, 4 (4), pp.311-318. ⟨inria-00405356⟩