Securing SIP infrastructures with PKI — The analysis

The communication environment of present IP networks offers wide options of multimedia real-time communication (RTC) possibilities. RTC is a type of communication service provided over IP, which introduced its specific security threats and security related problems that may disturb a RTC communication environment. RTC communication consists of two parts — signalization and multimedia data transfer. Within the signalization part, the SIP (Session Initialization Protocol) protocol became dominant. In the data transfer part, there is the RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) protocol. From the security point of view, on one side both of these protocols use several built-in security mechanisms. On the other side, there exists a whole autonomous infrastructure specially built for the provisioning and support of secure communication. The infrastructure is known as the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). The article focuses on the present state analysis of use and cooperation of RTC and PKI in order to provide forms of better and more complex RTC security.