Evaluating Measures and Countermeasures for SPAM over Internet Telephony

Abstract

Nowadays telephony has developed to an omnipresent service. Furthermore the Internet has emerged to an important communication medium. These facts and the raising availability of broadband internet access have led to the fusion of these two services. VoIP is the keyword that describes this combination.

Furthermore it is undeniable that one of the most annoying facets of the Internet nowadays is email spam, which is considered to be 80 to 90 percent of the email traffic produced.

The threat of so called voice spam or Spam over Internet Telephony is even more fatal than the threat that arose with email spam, for the annoyance and disturbance factor is much higher. 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 this paper we discuss how SPIT attacks can be put into practice, than we point out advantages and disadvantages of state of the art anti voice spam solutions. With the knowledge provided in this paper and with our SPIT producing attack tool, it is possible for an administrator, to find out weak points of VoIP systems and for developers to rethink SPIT blocking techniques.