loading...
Spot Me if You Can: Uncovering Spoken Phrases in Encrypted VoIP Conversations
May 18-May 21
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/SP.2008.212008 IEEE Symposium on Security and P ...
 This Article 
 
PDF
HTML
 
 Share 
   
 Bibliographic References 
   
 Add to: 
 
Digg
Furl
Spurl
Blink
Simpy
Google
Del.icio.us
Y!MyWeb
 
 Search 
   
Despite the rapid adoption of Voice over IP (VoIP), its security implications are not yet fully understood. Since VoIP calls may traverse untrusted networks, packets should be encrypted to ensure confidentiality. However, we show that when the audio is encoded using variable bit rate codecs, the lengths of encrypted VoIP packets can be used to identify the phrases spoken within a call. Our results indicate that a passive observer can identify phrases from a standard speech corpus within encrypted calls with an average accuracy of 50%, and with accuracy greater than 90% for some phrases. Clearly, such an attack calls into question the efficacy of current VoIP encryption standards.??In addition, we examine the impact of various features of the underlying audio on our performance and discuss methods for mitigation.
Index Terms:
network security, voice over IP, traffic analysis
Citation:
Charles V. Wright, Lucas Ballard, Scott E. Coull, Fabian Monrose, Gerald M. Masson, "Spot Me if You Can: Uncovering Spoken Phrases in Encrypted VoIP Conversations," sp, pp.35-49, 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (sp 2008), 2008
Usage of this product signifies your acceptance of the Terms of Use.