VoIP-Forum

The world is slowly understanding the security issues with Voice over IP. Computerworld reports:

The 99-page NIST report, \”Security Considerations for Voice over IP Systems,\” includes nine recommendations for IT managers to help them implement VoIP in a secure manner. \”Lower cost and greater flexibility are among the promises of VoIP for the enterprise, but VoIP should not be installed without careful consideration of the security problems introduced,\” the report says.

\”Administrators may mistakenly assume that since digitized voice travels in packets, they can simply plug VoIP components into their already-secure networks and remain secure. However, the process is not that simple,\” the report says.

• NIST report urges caution with VoIP security - Computerworld

As the commoditization and open sourcing of operating systems and applications continue to disrupt the software companies, telephony vendors have so far enjoyed a relative calm in the closed and proprietary phone systems market with substantial profit margins. That could now all be turned on its head with the proliferation of open source VoIP and PBX software. There are now a handful of these open source telephony platforms such as OpenPBX and Pingtel, but one of the most interesting is Asterisk, which even has its own communication protocol IAX in place of SIP for unified signaling and data transport.

• George Ou - ZDNet.com