Voice over VoIP. Secure or Pain?

by Gokul Gopalakris

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Dan York in his blog talks about a new project by a Georgia Institute student which promotes embedding conversation in the voice data stream. Very interesting. .

As Dan nicely puts it they are using the available bandwidth in a G711 audio stream and embedding the G729 stream in it. Looks good for security purposes. But this is what I percieve would be the problem in real case scenarios. There are valid applications that need these details. For example Legal Intercept, Loggers etc.

The current IP Loggers ( voice recorders used to record RTP packets) would need to have knowledge about this and for this to happen the underlying signalling protocol has to have knowledge about this ( maybe through SDP). If that information is passed, your security issues starts all over again.

My verdict is that it is a very smart research paper, but to actually implement it would throw the existing systems into a spin.