SIP signaling security for end-to-end communication

Current solutions for end-to-end signaling security require user-side powerful functions like authentication and protection. Additionally, end-to-end encryption of signaling may conflict with some security services provided by the intermediaries like network servers. It is important to consider the end user could provide a reasonable combination of security and that provided by the network servers. This paper presents two solutions that network servers help users to make end-to-end communication secure with lightweight load. These solutions are for mutual authentication and key management using signaling based on the IETF session initiation protocol. One solution, which involves trusted servers, enables mutual authentication without user-side public key operations, which reduces the cost of key management. The other solution has the same capabilities as the first one. In addition, the solution can allow a combination of trusted and partially trusted servers.