SIPE-SAP: SIP extension for signaling attacks protection

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has become popular as the Internet has been widely adopted. However, there are some new security issues faced by VoIP protocols. Using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as VoIP signaling protocol is introduced issues called signaling attacks. In this paper, we proposed a lightweight mechanism to protect SIP-based VoIP from signaling attacks by introducing an additional header field and a method to protect some important header fields such as Proxy-Authorization, To and Call-ID which are targeted to the attacks. The proposed mechanism protects against SIP messages forgery and modifying SIP messages. The experimental results show that the average registration response time of SIPE-SAP is not much different than normal SIP registration. In addition, the SIPE-SAP call setup overhead is less than TLS.