Protecting SIP server from CPU-based DoS attacks using history-based IP filtering

Author

Zhou, Chenfeng Vincent ; Leckie, Christopher ; Ramamohanarao, Kotagiri

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Software Eng., Univ. of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Volume

13

Issue

10

fYear

2009

fDate

10/1/2009 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

800

Lastpage

802

Abstract

Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony is vulnerable to a range of attacks, since its operation relies on the underlying IP network. The centralized design of the major VoIP signalling protocols such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) makes the registration server a target for CPU-based denial of service (DoS) attacks. In this paper, we propose a history-based IP filtering layer to defeat these DoS attacks by blocking the SIP packets from previously unseen sources. Our empirical evaluation shows that our approach achieves significant improvement in CPU utilization under DoS attacks.

Keywords

IP networks; Internet telephony; filtering theory; signalling protocols; telecommunication security; CPU-based DoS attack; IP network; SIP server protection; VoIP signalling protocol; VoIP telephony; denial-of-service attack; history-based IP filtering; session initiation protocol; Authentication; Computer crime; Filtering; IP networks; Internet telephony; Network servers; Protection; Protocols; Signal design; Web server; VoIP, CPU-based DoS attacks.;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Communications Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1089-7798

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LCOMM.2009.090840

Filename

5288468