What is VoIP security all about? After close to ten years of hacking and bashing VoIP, Ari Takanen will finally reveal the secrets and discuss the hype around VoIP security. The discussions in this blog will draw from his book "Securing VoIP Networks: Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Countermeasures" co-authored by Peter Thermos, and published by Addison-Wesley.
Ari will answer any questions and comments you might have regarding penetration testing and fuzzing of next generation communication networks such as IP telephony.
Check out the sample chapter of the VoIP book here!
It is easy to do pentetration testing. My two year daughter can do it (well at least she broke through a screen-lock). But doing it well is the challenge. That is what coverage is about. Security test coverage, like any test coverage, is measuring how much of all the possible sensible options you cover with your testing. Let's dig into this topic a bit more, and perhaps next time someone comes offering you pentesting services, you will have a few new questions to ask the auditors.
Hackers (or security researchers) come with a range of rainbow colored hats. Some guys'n'gals are nice (the White Hats). They find and disclose problems in communication products using approved responsible disclosure models. Others are in the business for money, and are not satisfied by the fame they get for disclosing problems. The process can easily get close to what some would consider unethical, or even direct blackmailing.
The leap from manual tests or simple scripts into fully automated test suites makes all self-respecting test engineers just simply excited. It is difficult to see the limits to the things where test automation could be used. But hold on! Are you thinking straight? Why was it that you were looking for test automation in the first place?
Have a look at all leading security companies today, and you see all of them launching or planning to launch solutions targeted at visualizing and collaborating over security issues. What is this about? Let's have a look at different initiatives in this area.
Finally, some real data on the usage of fuzzing is emerging. Who is using fuzzing? How do people see fuzzing being used in the product security process? Forrester has included questions regarding use of fuzzing in to their questionnaire that they send to key industry CIOs, CSOs and CISOs. Security companies such as Cigital are publishing their findings. I have talked with these organizations and will be discussing my findings in this blog and the upcoming webinar.
Based on a recent study by Gary McGraw and other well known security gurus, all major product security teams apparently use fuzzing. But most (even security specialists) still seem to misunderstand what fuzzing really is about. Enter the world of fuzzing!
I get questions regarding VoIP deployment all the time. Sometimes it is someone looking for simple and cheap Enterprise VoIP, who are unsure if VoIP can be deployed securely with those two parameters in the equation. More often it is the security aware people who are willing to invest almost anything to make it work, but cannot. As always, there is no silver bullet solution for either. If you look at my past opinions, I keep changing my mind between cheap that works, and secure that doesn't. What do you think? Which way should we go in VoIP?
After a quick tour of some Really Talented Groups dedicated to fuzzing research, I noticed three things: 1) Most teams are focused on fuzzing VoIP 2) Most if not all VoIP devices still break with fuzzing 3) Most VoIP vendors still do not get it. The tour continues...
Now something completely unrelated to VoIP: Reason behind all vulnerabilities in software! I read an article that explained how vulnerabilities are basically created by the fact that people tend to drift from good development principles into practices that are just simply Fun. The engineers among us know that software development can be enormously interesting, something you would happily even do in your leisure time. But can fun be converted into reliable software?
Where Google Chrome security fails: the password I heard mention that the Chrome OS will have some sort of encryption available a la bitlocker. If it's possible to encrypt personal data using another password or key, then it may have potential for very secure data.... And Ubuntu has an 'encrypt home directory' option, perhaps google should follow suit.
- Dann
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