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SIP Best-practice Recommendations Against Network Dangers to privacY
charter-ietf-sipbrandy-00-05

The information below is for an older proposed charter
Document Proposed charter SIP Best-practice Recommendations Against Network Dangers to privacY WG (sipbrandy) Snapshot
Title SIP Best-practice Recommendations Against Network Dangers to privacY
Last updated 2016-06-16
State Start Chartering/Rechartering (Internal Steering Group/IAB Review)
WG State Proposed
IESG Responsible AD Murray Kucherawy
Charter edit AD Ben Campbell
Send notices to (None)

charter-ietf-sipbrandy-00-05

SIP with the SDP Offer/Answer model, along with RTP are widely used in
modern communications networks. But while secure RTP (SRTP) is available
to provide integrity and privacy protection to such communication, it is
rarely used end-to-end. This lack is due to several factors, notably the
pervasive use of signaling and media intermediaries in such networks and
the difficulties involved in deployment of strong identity mechanisms
for SIP. These factors are complicated by the fact that there are
several incompatible approaches to SRTP key exchange.

The current situation is unacceptable in the face of pervasive
monitoring, which RFC 7258 describes as "an attack on privacy". In
addition, the STIR working group is, at the time of this writing,
revising RFC 4744 to make strong identity attestations for SIP easier to
deploy. This gives the IETF an opportunity to define best practices to
improve privacy protections for users of SIP based communication, in
ways that improve upon the status-quo.

Objectives:

The SIPBRANDY working group will define best practices for establishing
two-party, SIP-signaled SRTP sessions with end-to-end security
associations, including a single, preferred SRTP key exchange mechanism.
These practices are expected to be deployable across typical SIP
networks, without the sharing of SRTP keying material with
intermediaries or third parties. These practices should protect against
man-in-the-middle attacks.

While confidentiality is the first priority of the working group, it may work on
aligning these practices with WebRTC, for example by defining best practices
for ensuring recipients of media flows have consented to receive such flows,
in order to prevent or mitigate the denial-of-service attack described in
RFC 5245, section 18.5.1. Likewise, the WG may consider compatibility with
aspects of PERC.

The working group will additionally coordinate with the MMUSIC working
group to define opportunistic security [RFC 7435] for SIP-signaled media
sessions for situations where strong protections are not necessary or not
feasible.

Non-Goals:

The working group is not expected to define practices for multi-party
session topologies, especially those involving media distribution
devices.

The working group is not expected to define new protocols or modify
existing ones; rather it will define practices for using existing
protocols. If the working group discovers gaps that require creation or
modification protocols, it will forward those gaps to the appropriate
working groups.

Inputs and Collaboration:

The WG will consider draft-peterson-dispatch-rtpsec and
draft-johnston-dispatch-osrtp as input to the work. The WG is expected
to collaborate closely with SIPCORE, AVTCORE, STIR, MMUSIC, RTCWEB,
PERC, and possibly DISPATCH.