There are two forms of authentication in SIP – authentication of a user agent (UA) by a proxy, redirect, or registration server and authentication of one UA by another. With Transport Layer Security (TLS), mutual authentication of proxies or a proxy and UA is accomplished using certificates. Authentication is used to allow only authorized access to a service or feature and prevent malicious or unauthorized use by other applications.

Digest Authentication

Digest authentication is a simple challenge/response method based on HTTP. For RFC 2069, it employs a MD5 hash algorithm to encode the username, realm, password, digest URI, and server generated nonce as follows:

RFC 2617 added a client generated nonce and quality of protection (QoP) to improve security as follows:

SIP Proxy and User Authentication

As depicted in the figure, the message flow for both proxy and user agent authentication is illustrated. The initial INVITE is challenged with a 407 Proxy authorization required. The UA responds with an ACK and then reissues the INVITE containing the authentication credentials. The next proxy server or end UA responds with a 401 Unauthorized message back to the source UA to again reissue the INVITE with the proper authentication credentials and complete the authentication process.

SIP Authentication Challenge Improves User Security

Features

SIP Software

VOCAL’s embedded libraries include a complete range of ETSI / ITU / IEEE compliant algorithms, in addition to many other standard and proprietary algorithms. Our SIP source code is optimized for execution on ANSI C  and leading DSP architectures  from TI, ADI, AMD, Intel, ARM, MIPS, and other vendors. The SIP software libraries  are modular and can be executed as a single task under a variety of operating systems or standalone with its own microkernel.

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