A lightweight authentication and hop-by-hop security mechanism for SIP network

This paper proposes a lightweight authentication and hop-by-hop security scheme between the SIP UA and server. Although a number of security schemes for authentication and key exchange in SIP network are proposed, they still suffer from heavy computation overhead on the UApsilas side. The SIP UA in the proposed scheme delegates cryptographically computational operations such as the exponentiation operation or point multiplication to the SIP server without degrading security strength. Our scheme supports the user authentication and SIP signaling protection against potential threats instead of the HTTP digest and TLS between the SIP UA and server. The proposed scheme is more efficient than the existing schemes in terms of computation overhead.