Book Image

Building Enterprise Ready Telephony Systems with sipXecs 4.0

Book Image

Building Enterprise Ready Telephony Systems with sipXecs 4.0

Overview of this book

Open source telephony systems are making big waves in the communications industry. Moving your organization from a lab environment to production system can seem like a daunting and inherently risky proposition. Building Enterprise Ready Telephony Systems with sipXecs delivers proven techniques for deploying reliable and robust communications systems. Building Enterprise Ready Telephony Systems with sipXecs provides a guiding hand in planning, building and migrating a corporate communications system to the open source sipXecs SIP PBX platform. Following this step-by-step guide makes normally complex tasks, such as migrating your existing communication system to VOIP and deploying phones, easy. Imagine how good you'll feel when you have a complete, enterprise ready telephony system at work in your business. Planning a communications system for any size of network can seem an overwhelmingly complicated task. Deploying a robust and reliable communications system may seem even harder. This book will start by helping you understand the nuts and bolts of a Voice over IP Telephony system. The base knowledge gained is then built upon with system design and product selection. Soon you will be able to implement, utilize and maintain a communications system with sipXecs. Many screen-shots and diagrams help to illustrate and make simple what can otherwise be a complex undertaking. It's easy to build an enterprise ready telephony system when you follow this helpful, straightforward guide.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Building Enterprise-Ready Telephony Systems with sipXecs 4.0
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Glossary

System security


The SIP protocol, like HTTP, is inherently insecure. The developers of SIP did not design it with security in mind. All messages are passed in clear-text and easily captured by any packet sniffing application. The potential security risks are:

  • Private voice conversations can be captured and made public

  • Potential for unauthorized calls from the system

  • The ability to impersonate a caller

  • Disruption of voice services

Just as HTTPS was developed to address the security issues with HTTP, SIPS has been developed to address security shortcomings with SIP. SIPS utilizes Transport Layer Security (TLS). TLS provides an encrypted channel over which a system can send SIP messages. sipXecs has support for SIPS/TLS built into the system.

The problem with TLS is that all devices in the system (phones, gateways, and PBX) must support it. At this point of time, however, not all devices provide TLS support and thus it isn't widely utilized within the SIP network (LAN) environment. This is expected...