How to make your SIP networks secure in wholesale VoIP Termination?

The most important aspect that keeps your VoIP communication secure is safeguarding the protocols that can make it work perfectly. In case of call center businesses, the term simply means Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). But while building the SIP network, the security wasn’t kept in mind which later created different problems and have raised some extra issues as well.

The creators of wholesale VoIP also didn’t take an account of security. And now making this system is more secure has become the topmost priority. Therefore, it’s important to address some important security mechanisms.

The risks associated with wholesale VoIP termination:

The first and foremost thing to consider while making the SIP connection more secure is to comprehend some important risks involved. They usually fall under two broad categories; firstly, the calls are being hijacked or interrupted by the third party, and secondly the dangers of interference associated with the service like the denial of multiple service attacks.

The first kind of attack mentioned would eventually lead to the dangerous hackers who are being able to gain a complete access to your SIP network and dialing unauthorized calls from your account. It typically allows them to intrude on the content of conversations and enable them to perpetrate fraud or can even steal an intellectual property as well. Now they are also being able to intrude in the call content in order to impersonate the caller for the intentions of phishing or any other illicit activity.

The second kind of malicious attack simply enable the hackers to disrupt or bring down their IP phone or even sometimes the overall VoIP network that causes a great disruption to the entire business. The attacks can be stopped efficiently if we consider using reliable wholesale VoIP termination services where professional people cannot only guide you well in your services but also provide significant help regarding security and protection.

What are the protection strategies to overcome the risks?

In order to keep your SIP connections secure, it’s crucial to protect the packets when they travel over the network. Now SIP data packets simply travel over the different TCP connections and leave them open to the threats or manipulation. We can simply protect them by utilizing the Transport Layer Security (TLS). As this will provide an encrypted channel through which it’s easy to send thousands of SIP messages. It has developed from the SSL technology which has developed originally to secure the website transactions. In order to make it work correctly, the VoIP devices should utilize the support of TLS.

If you need to ensure that your voice communications are safe & secure, then you can also configure the SIP-capable devices so they only accept multiple calls guarded by TLS.

In many cases, our VoIP network does not get separated from the internet and all network connections. So it’s quite significant to make sure that the network protection systems such as the firewalls are now being able to deal much efficiently with the SIP traffic.

Firewalls are usually configured to accept the traffic in the case if the connection is coming from the computer on the network. There is a small problem as we can make a call through SIP which utilizes the connections on two different ports. Its one port carrying the signal information and the other will carry the content of the call.  Therefore, the firewall simply allows the initial connection, but it will block the caller itself as well. So in order to get around, we need something that is known as ‘session controller’. This will eventually offer the public IP address for the VoIP server, and allow calls to connect. But the firewall also needs to understand the port information which is simply contained in multiple packets so that calls can be routed perfectly.