Performance Evaluation of VoIP Security Protocols

VoIP utilizes the Internet for the services, and therefore it is vulnerable to intrusions and attacks. Because provided services deal with information related to privacy of users, it requires high level security including authentication and the confidentiality/integrity of signaling messages and media streams. However, when such a protocol is implemented in a VoIP phone, the implementation can have limitations due to the limited resources. The present study purposed to implement VoIP security protocols and to evaluate their performance in terms of connection quality and voice quality by applying them to SIP proxy and UA (User Agent). In the result of performance evaluation, the application of the security protocols did not lower voice quality, but connection quality was high in the DTLS based security protocol. As the protocol was applicable to signaling and media paths based on DTLS, we found that it can be a solution for the limited resources of VoIP phone.