Towards Security and Enrichment of the IP Multimedia Subsystem Based Multiparty Conference

Next Generation Networks (NGN) focuses to improve the telecommunication core and access networks and plan to transport all the services by encapsulating them into packets via a single IP based network. IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) serves as a Service Delivery Platform for NGN. Conference, one of the main services provided by the IMS, allows the multiple users to communicate at a time. This service is subject to various types of flooding attacks (i.e. Invite Flooding Attack, REGISTER flooding attacks etc), internal threats (i.e. SQL Injection) and session based attacks (Session teardown attack, session modification attack etc). Moreover a single participant of the conference service is fully authorized to refer any number of other participants. It can result in dissatisfaction and conflict among the existing participants of the conference. The referred participant becomes the fully authorized member of the conference which limits the applicability of the conference service in the real life. To mitigate the effect of flooding attacks and internal threats we developed an Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) system. Election based distributed referring authority mechanism is proposed to handle the conflict arise due to the single participant based referring. To span the scope of the conference service in maximum number of real life scenarios parameterized refer request is introduced in the paper. Results are validated through deployment of the proposed solution over IMS testbed.