• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.6 no.7
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• pp.1854-1873
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• 2012

Owing to its simplicity and flexibility, the session initiation protocol (SIP) has been widely adopted as a major session-management protocol for Internet telephony or Voice-over IP (VoIP) services. However, SIP has faced various types of security threats. Call-disruption attacks are some of the most severe threats they face, and can greatly inconvenience consumers. In this paper, we analyze such SIP call-disruption attacks, and propose a method for detecting and counteracting them by extending the SIP INFO method with authentication. Using the proposed method, both the target user and the SIP server can detect the existence of a call-disruption attack on a user and counteract the attack. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method from the viewpoint of computational complexity by configuring a test-bed with an Asterisk SIP proxy server and an SIP performance (SIPp) emulator.