SPAM Over Internet Telephony and How to Deal with It

SPAM over Internet Telephony and how to deal with it Diploma thesis - Rachid El Khayari Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Claudia Eckert, Dr. Andreas U. Schmidt, Nicolai Kuntze Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology ’O misery, misery, mumble and moan! Someone invented the telephone, And interrupted a nation’s slumbers, Ringing wrong but similar numbers.’ Ogden Nash (1902 - 1971 / USA) 2 Acknowledgements I want to thank • Prof. Dr. Claudia Eckert for giving me the opportunity to work on this thesis. • Dipl. Inform Nicolai Kuntze and Dr. Andreas U. Schmidt for their great support and trust into my work. • my whole family including my parents Mohamed and Yamina, my brother Soufian, my brother Samir and his wife Nadya, my little niece Sara and last but not least my best friend Inesaf and all others who supported me on my way. 3 Affidavit I hereby declare that the following diploma thesis "SPAM over Internet Telephony and how to deal with it" has been written only by the undersigned and without any assistance from third parties. Furthermore, I confirm that no sources have been used in the preparation of this thesis other than those indicated in the thesis itself. Place, Date Signature 4 Introduction In our modern society telephony has developed to an omnipresent service. People are avail- able at anytime and anywhere. Furthermore the Internet has emerged to an important communication medium. These facts and the raising availability of broadband internet access has led to the fusion of these two services. Voice over IP or short VoIP is the keyword, that describes this combination. The advantages of VoIP in comparison to classic telephony are location independence, simpli- fication of transport networks, ability to establish multimedia communications and the low costs. Nevertheless one can easily see, that combining two technologies, always brings up new chal- lenges and problems that have to be solved. It is undeniable that one of the most annoying facet of the Internet nowadays is email spam. According to different sources email spam is considered to be 80 to 90 percent of the email traffic produced. Security experts suspect that this will spread out on VoIP too. The threat of so called voice spam or Spam over Internet Telephony (SPIT) is even more fatal than the threat that arose with email spam, for the annoyance and disturbance factor is much higher. As instance an email that hits the inbox at 4 p.m. is useless but will not disturb the user much. In contrast a ringing phone at 4 p.m. will lead to a much higher disturbance. From the providers point of view both email spam and voice spam produce unwanted traffic and loss of trust of customers into the service. In order to mitigate this threat different approaches from different parties have been developed. This thesis focuses on state of the art anti voice spam solutions, analyzes them to the core and reveals their weak points. In the end a SPIT producing benchmark tool will be im- plemented, that attacks the presented anti voice spam solutions. With this tool it is possible for an administrator of a VoIP network to test how vulnerable his system is. 5 Contents Acknowledgements 2 Affidavit 3 Introduction 4 1 Basics 8 1.1 The history of telecommunication . 8 1.2 Voice over IP . 9 1.3 User Datagram Protocol . 9 1.4 Real-time Transport Protocol . 11 1.4.1 RTP Control Protocol . 13 1.5 Session Initiation Protocol . 13 1.5.1 SIP Transport . 13 1.5.2 SIP Messages . 13 1.5.3 Client/Server . 14 1.5.4 SIP URIs . 14 1.5.5 SIP Requests . 14 1.5.6 SIP Responses . 16 1.5.7 SIP session establishment . 19 1.5.8 SIP transactions/ dialogs . 19 1.5.9 SIP Message layout . 21 1.5.10 Session Description Protocol . 26 1.5.11 User Agent . 27 1.5.12 Registrar . 27 1.5.13 Proxy Server . 29 1.5.14 SIP security mechanisms . 30 1.5.14.1 SIP Digest Authentication . 31 1.5.14.2 SIPS (SIP Security) . 33 1.5.14.3 S/MIME . 34 1.5.14.4 IPSec . 35 2 SPAM over Internet Telephony 36 2.1 SPIT versus SPAM . 36 2.2 Intuitive SPIT definition . 36 2.3 SPIT analysis . 37 2.3.1 Information gathering . 37 2.3.2 SPIT session establishment . 39 6 2.3.3 SPIT media sending . 40 2.3.4 SPIT summary . 40 3 SPIT countermeasures and their weaknesses 41 3.1 Device Fingerprinting . 41 3.1.1 Passive Fingerprinting . 41 3.1.2 Active Fingerprinting . 42 3.1.3 Weakness of Device Fingerprinting . 45 3.2 White Lists, Black Lists, Grey Lists . 46 3.2.1 Weaknesses of White Lists, Black Lists, Grey Lists . 46 3.3 Reputation Systems . 47 3.3.1 Weakness of Reputation Systems . 48 3.4 Turing tests, Computational Puzzles . 48 3.4.1 Weakness of Turing tests and Computational Puzzles . 49 3.5 Payments at risk . 50 3.5.1 Weakness of Payment at risk . 50 3.6 Intrusion Detection Mechanisms, Honey phones . 51 3.6.1 Weakness of Intrusion Detection Mechanisms, Honey phones . 52 3.7 Summary . 53 4 SIP XML Scenario Maker 54 4.1 Technical Basis . 54 4.1.1 Message Editor . 55 4.1.1.1 SIPp message format . 56 4.1.2 Scenario Editor . 63 4.1.3 Shoot Mode . 64 5 Using SXSM as attack tool 68 5.1 Device Spoofing . 69 5.2 SIP Identity Spoofing . 71 5.3 SIP Header Spoofing . 71 5.4 Call Rate Adaption . 72 5.5 Account Switching . 72 5.6 Reputation Pushing or Pulling . 72 5.7 SIP Identity Hijacking . 73 5.8 CAPTCHA Relay Attack . 73 6 Conclusions and Outlook 74 Glossary 75 List of figures 76 List of tables 77 7 References 78 8 1 Basics of presented technology 1.1 The history of telecommunication Ever since people searched for opportunities to communicate over long distances. Optical telegraphs are viewed as the first practical applications of communication over distance and can be dated back to prehistoric times [22]. In order to send out messages, optical signals like light or smoke were sent with a specified code, so that the recipient could see them from far. The electric telegraph based on that principle and was used to transmit messages over electric wires. In the mid 1800s Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail invented a telegraph system in combination with an easy to use code (Morse code)[27]. This led to the success of telegraphy in America and long distance lines were constructed and spread over the country [9]. Only few decades after telegraphy revolutionized telecommunications, telephony began its history in the early 70s of the 19th century with the invention of the telephone[29]. The forefathers of the telephone Antonio Meucci[18], Johann Philipp Reis, Alexander Graham Bell[8] and Elisha Gray, amongst others had a clear vision in common of people being able to talk to each other over distance. Philipp Reis’ first prototype of a telephone was built as an attachment to the existing telegraphy network. The telegraphy network was the common data communication network and with Reis’ invention it was possible to alternatively transport voice through the same electrical wires[29]. Analog telephony is as old as the invention of the telephone itself. The first devices were physically connected through a wire. The voice was transported through modulation of electric signals on this wire. The first telephone exchange started in 1878 in New Haven[29]. The central office had a very simple switchboard and the connections had to be set manually by an operator. In central offices with manual switching, the operator asked the caller for the destination of the call and connected the line of caller and callee. Switching the connections manually reached its limit soon as the number of participants grew. This led to the development of automated switching systems at the turn of the century.[22] The automated switching systems replaced the operators and had to fulfil the same tasks. The caller signalized call initiation by picking up the phone and dialling the number of the destination. According to the pulses generated by the dialled numbers the electromechanical switches selected, which lines had to be connected to establish the call[46] . This type of negotiation is referenced as in-band signalling, because the signalling for call establishment and the voice are sent over the same wire. Parallel to the analog telephone network telex (teleprinter exchange) systems were developed. With this technology written messages could be transported over wire lines. The telephone network and the telex network coexisted and in Germany e.g. end users had to have two connections, one for telephone and one for telex. The further evolution of the telephone network proceeded from electromechanical switching systems to digital electronic switching 9 systems in the late 1970s[9]. The transition from analog to digital techniques in telephony led to the development of ISDN (Integrated Service Digital Network ) a telephone network system which upgraded the existing analog system. End to end digital transmission could be realized and voice and data services could be transmitted over the same network. Neverthe- less the Public Switched Telephony Network (PSTN) remained a circuit switched network as far as the communication channels are concerned. A fixed bandwidth channel was reserved between the communication partners, as if they were physically connected through a wire [9]. As the Internet technology arose telephony made the step from the circuit switched to the packet switched communication paradigm and this led to the development of Voice over IP.

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