Robert -- These are good questions.

On Sep 3, 2014, at 11:49 , Robert Nystrom <[email protected]> wrote:
> First:  Customer's ACME is visible from public Internet on udp/5060, and SIP 
> trunk is only being used to interconnect to SIP trunk carrier for inbound and 
> outbound dialing.  I've tested the SBC from the Internet and it actually 
> responds to INVITE and REGISTER messages (with 403 Forbidden).  They are 
> alsonot supposed to be allowing any REGISTER for remote user MD5 Digest 
> Authentication - but it does respond.  Question:  Is there any operational 
> need or business usage case that you would see that would make this setup a 
> good idea? 

Yes; you often do want to be able to REGISTER with the SBC from random places 
on the Internet. Does your specific customer need to allow registration from 
anywhere on the Internet? Maybe not. One popular place to blacklist in advance 
is APNIC IP space.

The Acme Packet has auto-blacklisting features that can be setup so that if a 
specific source IP sends several SIP messages without successfully registering 
or completing a phone call, then the SBC can blacklist the source for a while. 
E.g., if you don't successfully register within your first three SIP messages, 
then blacklist you for an hour.

If you do know in advance all the right places from which you 'd be sending SIP 
to the SBC, then it *is* best to setup the SBC for default-deny so that traffic 
only from those sources is permitted. That's straightforward to do by matching 
access-control-trust-levels between the realm-config and the access-control 
objects.

> Second:  I have written some SIP software that sends malformed message 
> headers, and have noticed that the SBC responds with different errors other 
> than 403 Forbidden when headers have unexpected values.  For example, when I 
> send an INVITE with extra CRLFs, I get a 400 CSeq missing header.  When I 
> send a Contact header of "None", I get 400 Invalid Contact.  This leads me to 
> believe that the SBC sip parser is parsing all of the SIP message rather than 
> always sending a 403 Forbidden to an IP address sourced from the untrusted 
> public Internet...this also seems to be very risky.  Is there a specific 
> security configuration with the policies that you would recommend?  It seems 
> like this introduces the risk of DoS and fuzzing attacks if the SBC is 
> parsing more of the SIP message rather than just dropping the message based 
> on invalid source IP.  Could lead to cpu and memory issues if the queues are 
> filled from invalid and fuzzed traffic.

The auto-blacklisting functions can help mitigate this risk. In addition to 
blacklisting based on failure to successfully REGISTER (or do anything else 
allowed by policy), you can auto-blacklist sources of "invalid signaling". I 
haven't found a good written definition of "invalid signaling", but I have 
definitely seen devices that sent slightly-malformed SIP trigger it and get 
blacklisted. Non-RFC3261-compliant CR's and LF's are definitely a popular way 
to do it. Bria/EyeBeam/X-Lite's "UDP Keepalives" (0-byte UDP datagrams) have 
been another way.

Further, there are internal resources (primarily, CPU capacity) allocated 
differently for trusted sources versus untrusted sources. An untrusted source 
could be a device that hasn't yet successfully registered , for example, and we 
might only want to give 2% of total system capacity to all untrusted sources. 

To your bigger point, though, Oracle/Acme Packet does try to be a security 
device, and I know they test it against fuzzers. Their release notes show when 
they fixed a security bug or a SIPd crash that was found through fuzzer 
testing. Yes, it means they have to be extremely careful with how they parse 
the SIP in order to do so safely.

>>> [email protected] +1-229-316-0013 http://ecg.co/lindsey

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