VoIP Identity Battle: Can Your Dog Make a Phone Call? (Part 1)
Posted by Jiri Kuthan on Tue, Mar 10, 2009 @ 08:15 PM
This is the first in a series of blog postings on the topic of "identity management" in SIP-based networks. The second posting is planned for Tuesday, March 24th.
Identity (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Definition): The condition or fact of a person or thing being that specified unique person or thing, esp. as a continuous unchanging property throughout existence; the characteristics determining this; individuality, personality.
Anonymity prevails in the Internet
Almost everyone knows the Peter Steiner's picture of a dog surfing on the Internet and saying to a fellow dog: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." [1] This 1993 famous picture shows that it is not easy between Internet users to establish identity credibly.
To a large extent that still holds, despite continuing privacy protectionists' concerns about disclosures through social networks and Internet providers' effort to track users for marketing and legal-interception purposes. By the way, did you know that in Italy visitors of Internet coffees have to present their passports?
Future unsettled
Still, what is going to happen next remains largely unsettled. Identity in telecommunications has been for decades a frequent topic of heated debates. Privacy defenders are concerned about "big brothers"; legal enforcement agencies about their ability to track communication of criminals. Service providers feel caught in between both - finding all positions mostly a liability for themselves. Credible horror stories have been brought both in favor and against privacy. Frequently, violation of privacy in non-democratic (and sometimes democratic) countries by governments and criminals has been reported and used as argument for making anonymous communication possible, in legal and more reliably technical ways. On the other hand, anonymous communication is not only an obstacle for law enforcement agencies. From my own consumer experience all anonymous phone calls I have answered in the past five years were solely a nuisance. This was particularly irritating whenever I was paying roaming charges for incoming telemarketers' calls.
State of the art
In most cases a modus vivendi developed in which service providers developed as a trust broker under influence of governmental organizations. If anonymous communication is desired, the service providers store information about the communication in confidentiality. Only if a law enforcement agency approaches the service provider with a legitimate disclosure request, the providers disclose confidential data. This is the case with telephone companies, Internet providers as well as Application Service Providers (ASPs).
VoIP impact
Nevertheless, this does not work well enough for VoIP. Like with traditional telephony, unsolicited calls can come at any time and cause very direct annoyance to the call recipient. The greatest advantage of the Internet ironically turns against the users. Whilst the Internet has reached its incredible penetration due to its global nature, technical simplicity and its economy, it is exactly the same features that telemarketers and attackers can enjoy. 6 AM telemarketing calls (of course automated) started from the other side of the globe or midnight attacks against your VoIP phone - that is all incredibly easy with VoIP. Recent attacks in Germany show this has begun to happen. [2]
Please come back on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009, to read the 2nd (of 3) posting on this topic.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog
[2] www.ipcom.at/fileadmin/public/2008-10-22_Analysis_of_a_VoIP_Attack.pdf