Industry Alliance Puts Forth VoIP, NGN Security Framework

As security framework for securing Voice over IP and other next generation networking environments has been put forth by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions. The framework, say organization officials, is the end-result of a year-long technical assessment and analysis led by chief technology officers, CEOs and senior executives from leading telecom carriers and manufacturing companies. The objective of the effort is to establish an industry-wide consensus on open technical and operational standards that support VoIP and network security.

Included within the VoIP work plan is an end-to-end interoperability reference model. The plan provides assessments and outlines development efforts to be coordinated by ATIS regarding Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based signaling; service architecture and real-time service processing; wireless transport; inter-provider interfaces; and routing services, among other areas.

Network security is a significant concern facing service providers as they deploy VoIP, and IP-based networks in general. Transport issues "- to include packet filtering, optical control, lawful intercept and 802.11 (WiFi) are a chief focus of the network security work plan. The plan calls for ATIS to develop a security operational guideline identifying the functions and information necessary to manage security-related services throughout the network infrastructure.

The network security plan also contains a detailed assessment on security issues surrounding firewalls and Network address Translators (NAT). ATIS expects to hold an industry symposium in September 2004 to seek agreement on a establishing common effective approaches to countering denial of service attacks, and for an interoperable application layer protocol access control mechanism. Organization officials say such an agreement would not only produce significant cost savings but also allay many of the challenges associated with interaction of various security management systems used by the industry today. (The ATIS web site is www.atis.org)