Hi Terry:
You have a bunch of good questions.
I would say that any type of VoIP, either DSL or Cable (don't let Rogers
make you believe that Home Phone isn't VoIP...it is), is far more secure
than a traditional Bell land line. For telephone banking, it is much easier
to intercept someones DTMF (touch tone) digits on an analog phone line than
it is on a digital one. They don't need to be outside your house or on a
pole. They just need access to any point on your loop (house, pole,
crossbox, splice can). These can be located anywhere between your house and
the nearest Bell CO or Remote. And the person wouldn't necessarily have to
stay their either. The bottom line is that the last mile of any connection
is the most vulnerable to intercept. Oh and don't let you think that Rogers
is very safe either. Just last week I was in the Oshawa Bell CO working on
a customer trouble with a Bell technician. We were looking for a spare pair
and were surprised to find dial tone (and then someone talking) on a pair.
It turned out that the Rogers installer didn't disconnect the copper line
outside the house and when the customer plugged their Home Phone adapter
into a normal jack (so they could get dialtone through the house) they were
driving the copper pair all the way back to the CO...in analog.
As far as security goes, your calls are going to be pretty secure. Not as
secure as they could be if you were able to use IPSEC or some other
encryption method (Kevin will probably chime in with zRTP), but I don't know
any VoIP providers (including ourselves) that offer this. It requires
decryption on the far end...so your iTSP or ISP has to be in on it
It is pretty hard for someone "on the internet" to intercept your packets
unless they have access to the core routers of the ISPs that are transiting
the data. Not impossible, but highly unlikely.
Yes, there is an initiative for a quasi-ssh like VoIP. Its called zRTP and
comes from Phil Zimmerman, the same guy that invented PGP encryption that is
used in email. It is very new however and not very mature yet. The person
on the far end would have to have the same setup.
Bill
----- Original Message -----
From: "terry D. Cudney" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <asterisk@uc.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 9:37 PM
Subject: Re: [on-asterisk] Scary Call from Bell Muscle Men...
Hello Philip and everyone,
This thread interests me, since, just over a month ago, I terminated my
relationship with Bell when we relocated.
Question is: How secure is, or how can one make voip secure? i.e. Is
Telephone Banking vulnerable over voip?
For our residential phone we are now using acanac and lesnet over aDSL
with dry-loop, asterisk 1.4.11 on my linux box here at home with a couple
of Aastra SIP phones and a Linksys 3102 to the analog phones in the
house.
Cost is much lower than Bell's minimal service and we now have all the
bells and whistles that Bell charges an arm and a leg for, at no extra.
I could go on about Bell's bumbling monopolistic methods, like repeated
phone calls to try to convince me to come back to Bell Sympatico for adsl,
billing me for a month after the service was terminated, when I call them
to try to straighten it out I get someone in India who can hardly speak
English who tells me that I have Bell Expressview on my account and that
the account was never terminated/settled... I tell them there is no
Expressview on the account and the account was terminated when I left that
address... 20 minutes of elevator music later I get dead air... (Boy am I
glad I no longer have any affiliation with Bell!!!)
Sorry about that rant...
Question, if you've read this far, is related to the comments below about
security on a voip call:
Philip Mullis wrote:
Anyone with enough skills can listen to your calls on the rogers
network, but that would imply they also have access to the switching
fabric in which your calls go through., also if you want to be super
secure, get a voip provider that does ipsec connections from you to them
,this will ensure very high security.
Not using Rogers, how secure are calls using adsl/asterisk to a itsp like
acanac or lesnet? Everytime I think I'm getting a handle on
networking/routing/dns/traffic-shaping/etc something new turns up. Like
ipsec. How do I determine if, or if not, ipsec is being used? Can I set it
up on my end unilaterally? or must it be a provision from the itsp?
Bell copper... mmmmm what can i say here... anyone with a 3$ phone from
wallmart, plyers and aligator clips can listen in on your call :/
True, but he'd have to be outside my house or on a pole somewhere, right?
With IP isn't it possible for anyone on the internet, savvy enough to do
it, to intercept packets and monitor calls/data transmissions from the
comfort of his living room? Unless we are using some kind of security or
tunneling protocol, or maybe IPSEC?
What would be the equivalent of an "ssh" data connection in the voip
world? What is the best/easiest/cheapest way to ensure security?
--terry
--
Name: Terry D. Cudney
Phone: (705) 812-3744 (lesnet DID)
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like...
having a peeing sectionin a swimming pool.
Tired of technology? Check this out: http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm
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