Exploiting SIP for Botnet Communication

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) implements methods for generic service discovery and versatile messaging. It is, therefore, expected to be a key component in many telecommunication and Internet services. For example, the 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem relies heavily on SIP. Given its critical role, ensuring the security of SIP is clearly a crucial task. In this paper, the authors analyze the SIP protocol and show that it can easily be exploited to mount effective and large-scale botnets.