A robust and efficient SIP authentication scheme

Abstract

Apart from its security, an SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) authentication protocol shall be efficient; because in order to replace traditional telephony, VoIP services have to offer enough security and QoS compared to PSTN services. Recently, Srinivasan et al. proposed an efficient SIP authentication scheme. The low delay overhead introduced by their scheme, causes the total call setup time to be well within the acceptable limit recommended by ITU-T. Based on their work, this paper proposes an SIP authentication scheme. In both schemes, the end users are authenticated with the proxy server in their domain using the registrar server. Comparing with the Srinivasan et al.'s scheme, our proposed scheme is more efficient and secure. Our scheme's low overhead makes it suitable for applying as an authentication protocol in SIP networks. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.