An energy efficient authenticated key agreement protocol
for SIP-based green VoIP networks
Liping Zhang, Shanyu Tang
n
, Shaohui Zhu
School of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China
article info
Available online 18 July 2015
Keywords:
Green networks
VoIP
Session initiation protocol
Authentication
Key agreement
Security
abstract
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is spreading across the market rapidly due to its characteristics such
as low cost, flexibility implementation, versatility of new applications, etc. However, the voice packets
transmitted over the Internet are not protected in most VoIP environments, and then the user's
information could be easily compromised by various malicious attacks. So an energy-efficient
authenticated key agreement protocol for Session Initial Protocol (SIP) should be provided to ensure
the confidentiality and integrity of data communications over VoIP networks. To simplify the
authentication process, several protocols adopt a verification table to achieve mutual authentication,
but the protocols require the SIP server to maintain a large verification table which not only increases
energy consumption but also leads to some security issues. Although several attempts have been made
to address the intractable problems, designing an energy-efficient authenticated key agreement protocol
for SIP-based green VoIP networks is still a challenging task. In this study, we propose an efficient
authentication protocol for SIP by using smartcards based on elliptic curve cryptography. With the
proposed protocol, the SIP server needs not to store a password or verification table in its database, and
so no energy is required for the maintenance of the verification table. Security analysis demonstrates
that the proposed protocol can resist various attacks and provides efficient password updating.
Furthermore, the experimental results show that the proposed protocol increases efficiency in
comparison with other related protocols.
& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Internet and communication technologies boost and diversify
the development of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applica-
tions. Compared with traditional Public Switched Telephone Net-
works (PSTNs), VoIP networks attract great attention since they
can provide low cost, flexibility implementation and versatility of
new applications. So far, more than five million peoples adopt VoIP
services, which are provided by Skype, Gtalk, iPhone, etc. How-
ever, with the rapid increase of the registered users on VoIP
networks, the energy cost of VoIP networks is also growth with
an alarming trend. Furthermore, since the voice data transmitted
over the VoIP environments are not protected, the privacy and
value information of the users could be compromised easily by
inactive or active attacks (Wang and Liu, 2011).
Session initiation protocol, developed by Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), is a text-based application layer control protocol
for VoIP setup, modification, and termination among participants.
(Rosenberg et al., 2002). The architecture of the SIP is generally
composed of the proxy server, redirect server, user agent, location
server, and register server, as well as main network elements.
Compared with other signaling protocols such as H.323, SIP is
more lightweight and flexible. However, the authentication of SIP
is inherited directly from HTTP Digest authentication (Franks et al.,
1999), which is vulnerable to several attacks such as impersona-
tion attacks, off-line password guessing attacks, and server-
spoofing attacks etc. In an attempt to ensure the confidentiality
and integrity of VoIP communication, an energy-efficient authen-
ticated key agreement protocol for SIP should be sought to achieve
mutual authentication and key negotiation between the caller and
the callee in a VoIP environment. Although several authenticated
key agreement protocols have been proposed in the past years,
developing an energy-efficient and secure authentication protocol
for SIP is still a challenging task. This is because the green VoIP
networks require the authentication protocol to satisfy both the
security and the efficiency requirements.
To avoid time-consuming operations, the hash function is
considered to be the best candidate to use in the design of security
measures. Since hash operations are faster than public key
cryptography, hash-based authentication protocols meet low com-
putational requirements of green VoIP by reducing the computa-
tional energy cost significantly. However, Kilinc and Yanik (2014)
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journal h omepage: www.elsevi er.com/locate/jnca
Journal of Network and Computer Applications
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2015.06.022
1084-8045/& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
n
Corresponding author. Tel./fax: þ 86 27 6784 8563.
E-mail addresses: shanyu.tang@gmail.com, carolyn321@163.com (S. Tang).
Journal of Network and Computer Applications 59 (2016) 126–133