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I find it absolutely insane that the industry standard for SIP trunks is unencrypted UDP, usually using IP-based authentication.

When I asked a popular VoIP carrier about this a while back, they argued that unencrypted connections were fine because the PSTN doesn't offer any encryption and they didn't want to give their customers a false sense of security. While technically true, this doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to implement basic security where we can - especially for traffic sent over the public Internet.



PSTN starts at the home router these days, I don't think I can get an actual analog line in my house.


My DOCSIS service provider turned off encryption. That's likely due to the certificate expiring on a popular modem brand. Key management is hard, certificate management is hard. Especially when they don't care about security. The encryption was only DES to begin with instead of AES which is supported in DOCSIS but few service providers bother. Anyone who has the tools to sniff DOCSIS can eavesdrop on my provider's nodes and hear the incoming leg of phone calls.


Great example. Anyone who cavalierly states "let's do PKI!" has not done PKI.




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