Notes, SIP Security Ad-Hoc, IETF 51


Recorded by:
Frank W. Miller, Ph.D.
Chief Technical Officer
sentitO Networks, Inc.

www.sentito.com

 SIP Security Adhoc Meeting Minutes

 Meeting held on Wednsday August 8, 2001 at 51st IETF located at the Hilton Metropole in London , England .

 Some early comments:

* Removal of Signal Header (?) means that some way of passing security information transitively is required
* Security information must be handed from one UA to another

Meeting proper:

* A threat model and analysis must be developed

* Mike?s draft could be used as a starting point (Henning pointed out that the draft would be alright as a starting point but that it is incomplete)

* Mike?s draft discusses ?inside? vs. ?outside? threats

* Oran asked for these to defined

* Mike defined them as follows: an outside threat is one that is presented by an entity that is not participating and has no visibility into a conversation and an inside threat is one that is presented by a participant in a conversation

* For outside threats, the use of TLS etc. vs. http digest may suffice

* Some discussion about inside vs. outside being an instance of thread prioritization

* Mention of possible use of call control model as a way to model inside vs. outside and to breakdown the description of inside threats to the next level

* Jonathan described an example (which I didn?t get to write down) of what he referred to as a ?SIP-specific? threat

* The relationship between entities needs to be defined: Henning referred to the relationship between a UA and a gateway as ?semi-adverserial?

* At this point in the meeting, the question of whether the remainder of the meeting would focus on the threat model or would also include mechanisms came up.

* An immediate mention of several mechanisms was made: authentication, authorization, and integrity checking

* The discussion of mechanisms was agreed to a bit later

* A list of threats was proposed and some examples of use included

List of Threats                                                  Examples of Use

Identical Replay                                                Hangup, Service Theft,

Modified Replay                                                           Registration Hijacking,

Message Forgery                                                          User Impersonation

Disclosure of Call Signaling Information

Denial of Service (DoS)

    - Message Injection
    - Message Deletion
    - Message Amplification

It was noted that the list of threats constitutes a different taxonomy for describing the threats than Mike?s taxonomy

Henning commented that this approach may be superior since it seemed intuitively easier to show completeness for

Also noted that this new taxonomy does not capture descriptions of level of trust

Dave described an example where a UA uses a RADIUS sever for authentication but that anyone that can compromise the RADIUS server also compromises the UA, allowing it to be impersonated (not sure I copied this right Dave)

A description of the ?Pentagon? described in Mike?s draft was presented

The Pentagon is used to describe boundaries of trust

Mike?s draft presents a fully connected graph and describes the level of trust between each pair of endpoints

Discussion centered on the possibility that this approach may imply that all mechanisms are necessary for all types of connections

Dave mentioned that the saving grace was that it would probably possible to also describe when those mechanisms would and would not actually be used

The question was raised about whether conformance to security requirements and any mechanisms necessary to indicate this was or was not the case was necessary all along the signaling path?

The question was asked but never answered, ?where are the keys for SRTP handled??

It was noted that the ability to do end-to-end body encryption will be necessary!

The question was asked, ?will parties along a signaling path need to be able to authenticate a UAC??

Discussion then ensued about whether authentication should be wrt UAs or users.  Some agreement emerged that UA (i.e. domain level) authentication might be valuable but that user level authentication would probably be impractical

This agreement came from a discussion about whether authentication was necessary for unsolicited calls.  In this case, domain-level authentication would probably provide some additional value but that user level authentication might be difficult if not impossible

The discussion then turned to what mechanisms will be included the bis regarding security given the looming Dec. deadline

Some agreement on the hop-by-hop discussion only that more complex mechanisms will need to be put in a separate draft

The point was made that mechanisms should only be proposed for the separated draft after at least one round of requirements had been circulated

Backward compatibility is important, additional security features cannot force a wholesale change to the existing bis mechanisms

Henning mentioned a potential practical problem: a separate draft will require a separate implementation.  The group did not see this as a serious problem

The discussion then turned to whether TLS or IPSec should be specified for hop-by-hop security

Mike?s main issue was that TLS does not work with UDP

Henning made the point that TCP works well for ?signaling trunks?, nailed up signaling connections that persist.  There was some question about the implications of HOL blocking in this situation. SCTP solves that potential problem

Main issue with IPSec is that it is somewhat decoupled from the application since it is done at Layer 3.  It is harder to do ?automatically?

Some agreement that TLS is appropriate for some cases and IPSec for others

It was noted that something must be made mandatory implementation, which is the quandary given the difficulties that the MobileIP group had

Dave noted that the UA to Proxy and Proxy to Proxy security can be different

A proposal was made to use TLS for Proxy to Proxy only as a mandatory implementation

Another potential bis problem was noted, ?how is a UA-to-UA with no previous trust relationship handled??  I did not gather any additional notes from that discussion

The meeting ended with a short discussion on the question of what the IESG would accept for a mandatory implementation


updated 13 Dec 2001 13:23:08 -0600