Hiding Skype VoIP Calls from Parametric Identification

Mauro Migliardi; Roberto Podesta; Matteo Tebaldi; Massimo Maresca

1st International ICST Conference on Forensic Applications and Techniques in Telecommunications, Information and Multimedia

Research Article

Hiding Skype VoIP Calls from Parametric Identification

Cite: BibTeX Plain Text

@INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/e-forensics.2008.2673,
    author={Mauro Migliardi and Roberto Podesta and Matteo Tebaldi and Massimo Maresca},
    title={Hiding Skype VoIP Calls from Parametric Identification},
    proceedings={1st International ICST Conference on Forensic Applications and Techniques in Telecommunications, Information and Multimedia},
    publisher={ACM},
    proceedings_a={E-FORENSICS},
    year={2010},
    month={5},
    keywords={VoIP Skype Call identification Parametric Identification.},
    doi={10.4108/e-forensics.2008.2673}
}

Mauro Migliardi
Roberto Podesta
Matteo Tebaldi
Massimo Maresca
Year: 2010
Hiding Skype VoIP Calls from Parametric Identification
E-FORENSICS
ACM
DOI: 10.4108/e-forensics.2008.2673

Mauro Migliardi¹^,*, Roberto Podesta²^,*, Matteo Tebaldi³^,*, Massimo Maresca⁴^,*

1: Centro Ingegneria Piattaforme Informatiche (CIPI) University of Genoa and University of Padua Via Opera Pia 13 16145 Genoa, Italy +39 328 1003221
2: DIST – University of Genoa Via Opera Pia 13 16145 Genoa, Italy +39 010 3532709
3: DEI - University of Padua Via Gradenigo 6 35131 Padua, Italy
4: Centro Ingegneria Piattaforme Informatiche (CIPI) University of Genoa and University of Padua Via Opera Pia 13 16145 Genoa, Italy

*Contact email: mauro.migliardi@unipd.it, ropode@dist.unige.it, tebaldi.matteo@gmail_.com, Massimo.maresca@unipd.it

Abstract

The proliferation of wideband connections and the use of more innovative technological platforms in both the business and the private market have caused a shift of the phone traffic from traditional circuit switched networks to packet switched IP based networks in the so-called Voice Over IP revolution. The flexibility of VoIP in general and of Voice Over Internet in particular comes at a price: the lack of a dedicated carrier infrastructure makes extremely hard to identify calls and to track them, thus lawful interception has turned extremely difficult as voice is mixed and randomly interleaved with generic data traffic. In past works it has been demonstrated the feasibility of call identification based on statistical parameters of data flow. However, we argue that it is extremely easy to “poison” the statistical characteristics of a VoIP stream making it stealthy without compromising its acoustical quality and we prove it first implementing a statistical detector showing a larger than 95% accuracy in detection and then a simple program capable of scrambling the statistical characteristics of Skype data streams.

Keywords: VoIP Skype Call identification Parametric Identification.

Published: 2010-05-16
Publisher: ACM
Modified: 2010-05-16

: http://dx.doi.org/10.4108/e-forensics.2008.2673