Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to show, first, the reason why VoIP should be secured and, second, how it is done. The biggest flaw in VoIP is that people get the wrong information about what it is and how it works. When reading books or papers on the Internet, you will see that many different people and organizations have their own opinions on how to secure VoIP. Most people don t think about VoIP in the right way and cite the following reasons for thinking that VoIP is secure with some standard methods:

• I have spent a good deal of capital on new routers, and all the access lists work on them.

• We do have firewalls up in our network.

• The phones are going to be on our internal network only.

• Our engineer has installed QoS on our network.

As you can see by these reasons, most people do not have a full understanding of why and how to secure VoIP traffic on a network. In this chapter we will explain why and how Check Point secures VoIP traffic.

Why Secure VoIP?

The first question most people ask when you broach the subject of security with regards to VoIP is well, they are just phones; why do they need to be secured? VoIP is just another set of protocols, like many others that are used on networks today, and so they need to be secured. If they are not secured from each other, they at least need to be...