Not without problems

It is not necessarily a smooth transition to VoIP. Numerous organizations have faced problems [Hoover 2005] and there remain vast areas where further work is needed.

Potential for Spam over Internet Telephony (SPIT), Denial of Service, …

Slide Notes

[Hoover 2005] J. Nicholas Hoover, VoIP Gotchas, InformationWeek, November 14, 2005 http://www.internetweek.cmp.com/showArticle.jhtml?sssdmh=dm4.158123&articleId=173602687 Links to an external site.

Transcript

[slide68] But of course, it's not without problems. And one of those problems is called SPIT, spam over IP telephoning. Right? Because now I can send out massive numbers of requests to start sessions, and I of course can play media out to them, who would you like to vote for to be dog catcher and blah, blah, blah. Yes. The potential's ugly. The other problem is denial of service, right? Because now the people are depending upon their voice over IP systems, what do you do? You can do attacks against them so that no one can manage to actually get voice over IP calls there. So for instance, you could block a company that was depending upon orders coming in to reserve rooms in their hotels or restaurant tables or whatever. And as of yet, organizations are still struggling trying to figure out how do we deal with these kind of issues. And you would think it must be really very simple. We have it in digital form, can't I just simply write a thing that will recognize is it one of the people whose calls I want to take? Is that easy to do or not? Can I make a piece of software that will say should I receive this call or should I just block that caller? We can do it, but does it work well? No, but the problem basically is it's called the introduction problem. I don't know necessarily who's going to call me in advance of the universe of all people, so I don't know whether I should block them or not. Right? After they call and I say no, I never want to speak to you again. Right, I know to block it. [student says: We can block certain calls, certain numbers which we know, but I think it's not possible that we could block all of them.] Right. So one of the difficulties is how can you build a service now where you can have new people that it's the first time they call you and you want to let them call you in some way, whereas others you want to block even though you've never spoken to them before. So people have looked at this and I'll simply stop there and say it's an interesting area you can take a look at.