Understanding the IM Security Threat

Chapter 16 - The IP Multimedia Subsystem: True Converged Communications

During the last years chat based instant messaging has become a part of the normal communication culture. Instant messaging based chat is now rapidly becoming a mainstream communication medium even in business environments. The same is becoming true for Voice over IP enabled audio communication. Skype, a high quality VoIP software has been downloaded over 200 million times and internet providers start to sell transparent VoIP products, which are usable with ordinary telephones. But these new technologies require new communication choices. We conducted an experiment to observe the effect of these new communication media on groups of four using chat or audio communication to work on tasks of uncertainty or equivocality. The results showed that audio groups were significantly more productive than chat groups for tasks of equivocality, while chat communication groups proved to be at least as productive as audio groups on tasks of uncertainty. Therefore we wanted to explore further, why these effects happened and what factors influenced the productivity of the groups. Based on our previous research and the media richness theory and the theory of media synchronicity the paper poses the hypothesis, that audio communication is faster, while chat communication is more efficient.

This article aims to know the impact of communication technology in organizational communication. As we know organizational communication has limitations because of distortions, one of which is caused by physical distance. However, with the development of technology, physical distance can be overcome by sending the work instruction, discussion, and decision-making through email or instant messengers like WhatsApp, Blackberry Messenger that can be accessed by simply using the phone. The advantage of instant messaging services is that it can be used by anyone, anywhere and anytime without the need to meet at the office. Technology changes offices into virtual ones. Distortion due to the dissolution of the message on one level in the organizational structure can be minimized because employees who are members within the group instant messenger can read messages simultaneously. Additionally, nonverbal message during face to face communication can be replaced with emoticons. But the downside is the time to work is often used for informal messaging not relevant with work and the employee ultimately can be drowned in a flood of data, including ones not needed to complete the job.

In a situation of an unexpected catastrophe, uncertainty and demand for information are constant. In such a disaster scenario, the CRISIS system arises as a tool to contribute to previous coordination, procedure validation, exercise execution, a good and frequent communication among organizations, and weakness and threat assessment for an appropriate risk management. It offers a wide variety of tools for online communication, consultation and collaboration that, up to this day, includes cartography, tasks, resources, news, forums, instant messaging and chat. As a complement, mathematical models for training and emergency management are being researched and developed. For Argentinean society, it is a necessity to switch from the current handcrafted, bureaucratic emergency management method to a decision-making management model. Previous coordination, exercise execution, a fluid communication among institutions, and threats and weaknesses assessment are required for a proper risk management. With that goal in mind, it is important to reduce confusion, avoid the duplication of efforts to fulfill the same tasks, and have access to a complete vision of the situation, generated from the data of all the organizations taking part. The CRISIS system is a secure web application, accessible to every node in a network formed by the organizations which have complementary responsibilities during prevention and response. It offers a wide variety of tools for online communication, consultation and collaboration that, up to this day, includes cartography, tasks, media (organization and resources), news, forums, instant messaging and chat. As a complement, mathematical models for training and emergency management are being researched and developed. Currently, there are toxicological and epidemiological emergency models available. The present paper analyses, from the perspectives related to risk management for emergencies and disasters, the strengths and weaknesses of the CRISIS system to be used for prevention, response and recoveries in the case of a catastrophe.

Chapter 2 - AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is one of the most popular technologies nowadays that facilitate the user by providing different features as instant messages, phone calls, video calls, and voicemails. Basic VoIP protocols were designed to be efficient instead of secure. After numerous attacks on these protocols several solutions were proposed to prevent against these threats. In this paper, we focus on the security of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) that is used to initiate, modify, and terminate the VoIP sessions. The paper presents the design and implementation of secure layered architecture for SIP, which adds a new layer to the standard SIP layer model and entitled as Security layer. The Security layer provides authentication, authorization, adaptable feature, and secure key exchange, based on our newly designed protocol, named as Session Initiation Protocol using Single Sign-On (SIPSSO). In order to implement the secure layered architecture based on SIPSSO, we have developed an Android Secure Call application and extend the open source Asterisk accordingly. After the designing and implementation phases, we have verified the SIPSSO protocol formally by using an automated security verification tool, Scyther. Our analysis results reveal that by adding Security layer, we ensured protection against different SIP attacks such as Eavesdropping, Man In The Middle (MITM) attack, Message Tampering, Replay attack, Session Teardown, and Spam over Internet Telephony (SPIT).

After analyzing SRTP (Secure Real-time Transport Protocol) and SIP (session initiation protocole), we identified the need to secure VoIP (Voice over IP) network. Our study assesses the risk of attacks on the VoIP network. Additionally, it offers solutions to the existing VoIP network vulnerabilities while issuing Instant Messages. Using cryptography, we present a general proposal for secure VoIP instant messages and SIP protocol.

Instant Messaging has been widely applied for both corporate use and personal use in recent years. Major Instant Messaging service providers adopt the Push Technology to ensure the immediacy of message forwarding, which efficiently provides a great convenience for user. However, the immediacy feature causes side-channel information leakage even if some protection measures has been implemented, such as information encryption strategy. In particular, we observe that senders’ traffic flows have a strong temporal correlation with those of corresponding recipients, since the messages are forwarded to recipients as soon as they are received by servers. Based on the observation, attackers can infer real-time communications between pairwise users and even the social connections of users. In this paper, we present a methodology framework to validate this side-channel information leakage, which identifies users of real-time communications by matching the pairwise time sequences of traffic flows. We evaluate the method on the collected real-world data. The experimental results show that users’ communications can be identified with a high accuracy, and 6 groups of users are inferred to have strong connections based on the data collected from a local area networks.

MOST READERS of this column, I suspect, don't have time to read a lot of IT (information technology) insider newsletters, reports, and so on. Since I spend a day or two a week reading this kind of material, I thought I would share with you some of the more interesting and sometimes disturbing things I've read recently. Despite the downturn in the economy in the last quarter of 2001, the Internet did not seem to be affected: it just kept on growing exponentially. Here are some recent figures from NetworkWorld. The number of host computers connected to the Internet rose to 137 million last year, up 40% over the 97 million reported in December 2000. It is interesting to note that about half of the three billion documents indexed by Google are corporate pages, and that proportion is expected to grow. Thus when students surf the Web, half of what they see is generated by a corporation, not by an educational organization. Maybe we need to add required courses such as Media Literacy and Knowledge Work to the curriculum. At the very least we need to help our students understand that they need to consider the source. Traffic on the U.S. portion of the Internet backbone rose to over 55 pentabytes (a pentabyte is a million gigabytes) per month, more than double the 23 pentabytes recorded in January 2001. (Supposedly one pentabyte equals 20 million four-drawer file cabinets filled with text. I wonder who figured this out?) In addition, the number of U.S. adults connected to the Internet rose 5% last year, with 62% now connecting to the Internet at least three times in the past three months. I find this last figure hard to believe, and I am still trying to digest it. I suspect it means that the Internet is becoming a mass medium, like television or radio. The rapid growth in the number of connected servers, in the amount of content available, and in the number of users is creating technological and economic headaches for education IT departments. Consider Oregon State University, for example, which has 22,000 students and employees and supports them with two leased DS-3 lines that provide a combined bandwidth of 90 Mbit/sec. Even at that, the university has to restrict inbound Internet traffic to 22 Mbit/sec. Internet connections of this kind cost more than $300,000 per year, and that is only for the connection -- not for all the hardware, software, and people needed to maintain it. School districts with a similar number of students and employees face even worse problems, since their schools are spread out over large geographical areas. Most moderately sized school districts probably have Internet connections in the 1-10 Mbit/sec. range and desperately need more bandwidth. E-rate funding (federal subsidies to schools for Internet access) has helped some, but much more needs to be done to support school and district connectivity. It varies widely, but my guess is that it takes a budget category of about one to five times the cost of the Internet connection to support it with people and equipment. So, even if the government gives you the money for your Internet connection, you still have to use large sums of local money to support it. If people only wanted to use the Internet for text-based traffic, such as e-mail and reading text-based Web pages, life would be simple. But such is not the case. People are beginning to expect the Internet to be a multimedia medium that supports voice calls (voice-over IP [Internet protocol]), instant messaging, videoconferencing, streaming video on demand, and MP3 music. Since the Internet was not designed for such things and since these kinds of uses take massive amounts of bandwidth, we've got problems -- big ones. One of the biggest problems facing the Internet community is multimedia instant messaging (IM). I didn't realize that IM or Internet chat was so popular until I polled 100 or so of my university students: more than three-quarters said they used IM daily. …

Most popular instant messaging clients are now offering Voiceover-IP (VoIP) technology. The many options running on similar platforms, implementing common audio codecs and encryption algorithms offers the opportunity to identify what factors affect call quality. We measure call quality objectively based on mouthto-ear latency. Based on our analysis we determine that the mouth-to-ear latency can be influenced by operating system (process priority and interrupt handling), the VoIP client implementation and network quality.

Systems employing the Internet and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) are alternative to the legacy landline telephony system. The services offered by these systems allow users to communicate with their family members, friends, banks and business partners whenever they are online. Particularly, the VoIP service is popular with the Internet users because charges are bound into usually fixed access costs making the price of the long distance calls themselves appear economical and even free. However, VoIP services have several disadvantages. One of the disadvantages of VoIP is, it is exposed to Internet security vulnerabilities, threats and attacks. The attacks come in many forms. One of the methods to attack the VoIP service, is by sending a Spam over Internet Telephony (SPIT). SPIT is normally executed by malicious parties initiating automated, unsolicited, and unwanted communications that used VoIP or video conferencing services, just like an email SPAM. Solutions to mitigate SPIT are still lacking. To defense a VoIP system from SPIT, we have come out with the idea of Automated Intrusion Detection and Prevention System over SPIT (AIDPoS) that can detect and prevent SPIT from external parties to enter the VoIP network. AIDPoS is a combination system of Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) on Voice over IP (VoIP) server. This is an experimental research to find a solution to combat SPIT if it happens in the future. Our result shows that an automated Intrusion detection and Prevention system over SPIT attack is feasible. Our work is on an open source VoIP network. Other vulnerabilities and threats are important, but beyond our research scope and is not covered in this paper.

As the development of information technology is increasing rapidly influenced by the many discoverie s and scientific development so as to create a tool that supports the acceleration of technological development one of their communication systems The development of information and communication technologies are rapidly is encouraging companies to improve operational capabilities and services to customers. One of the information and telecommunications technology used by the company is an instant messenger technology. Instant Messeng ing technology is a new technology that can be used for communication between two or more people on a computer network, Tekonologi a new breakthrough in the development of information technology because of its excellence in providing ease of communication in real time. Keywords : Instant Messeger, Computer Networking , Teachnologi

Computer networks have become central to almost all computing and information processing applications. The arrival of the Internet into daily life has greatly increased the relevance and importance of computer networks. More and more applications rely on efficient and reliable network operation, such as the world wide web, email, instant messaging, Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), and network–based audio and video. Networks such as the Internet and individual corporate networks have become as essential as to qualify as critical infrastructures for home, work, and government. Ensuring proper operation of the networks is an extremely important task, as also the task of properly designing and improving the network infrastructure. Simulation is an indispensable method in designing and improving networks. Network simulations are now routinely used in all aspects of network design, configuration, and analysis.

Study of Social Networking usage in Higher Education Environment

The purposes of this research are to describe types, practices of Synchronous and Asynchronous learning and to explore the challenges faced by the lecturers at English Departments in South Kalimantan. The researchers employed mixed-methods sequential explanatory design which consist of two distinct phases, quantitative (numeric data) by using questionnaire followed by qualitative by using observation and interview in order to elaborate the results obtained from quantitative data. This research was undertaken in nine English Departments in South Kalimantan. The participants were 53 English lecturers who teach at those universities. The types of synchronous used by the lecturers were Text-based chat / Instant Messaging / Online Chat (WhatsApp), Web Conferencing / Virtual Classroom (Zoom and Google Meet), Whiteboards, Real-time and Non real time document sharing (Google documents). The asynchronous types were Email, WhatsApp Group, Google Classroom, YouTube Link, PDF Files, MS Words Files, Learning Management System (LMS)/e-learning. The lecturers used direct feedback, real time classroom interaction and communication during synchronous learning. On the other hand, they provided delayed feedback, practiced not real time classroom interaction and communication in asynchronous learning. They facilitated individual and group collaboration for both learnings. The lecturers faced a number of challenges in implementing Synchronous and Asynchronous learning such as Technological Problems / Internet Connection, Students’ Motivation, Classroom Management, Lack of technological supports, Students’ Participation, Interaction, Time Management, Feedback, Materials Development, Monitoring, Instructional Method, Flexibility, and Cost Effectiveness.