In Depth

VoIP Security: When Voice Becomes Data

With voice over IP picking up speed, CSOs face the challenge of navigating an entirely new security threat landscape for the phone system

By Scott Berinato

September 01, 2006 — CSO —

To understand the significance of voice over IP (VoIP), it's useful to travel back in time. Specifically, go to 4:45 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 3, 1967. If you happened to be in a car in Sweden at that moment, you had to stop the car and do nothing for five minutes. Then at 4:50 you had to move your car from the left side of the road to the right, and then stop again. Finally, at 5 a.m., you could proceed, on the right. In those 15 minutes, the entire country changed a 300-year-old custom of Vänstertrafik, left-side driving, to Högertrafik, right-side driving.

In fact Dagen H, or H Day as it was called (the H for Högertrafik), began earlier than 4:45 that morning. It began in 1963, when the Riksdag (Swedish parliament) voted to switch in order to simplify border crossings with right-side-driving Norway, and to reduce accidents associated with Sweden's use of left-hand-drive cars on the left, which puts the driver at the edge of the road instead of the middle.

It was an epic cultural and infrastructural shift. Sweden created the Högertrafikkommision (HTK) — an entire bureaucracy to manage the massively complex project. Bus stops jumped sides of the street, traffic lights moved, roads got new lines and signs, one-way streets went the other way.

And, of course, people had to figure out how to drive on the right, so an education program started that included psychologists.

Even the day itself was more complex than a 15-minute square dance of Saabs and Volvos. In fact, nonessential vehicles were banned from the roads until 6 a.m., an hour past the official 5 a.m. crossover. Stockholm extended its ban until 3 p.m. A picture taken of a street in Stockholm right before the switch shows vehicles comically strewn across a street, like someone bumped a table full of Matchbox cars. Still, it worked. No fatalities were reported on Dagen H, and over the long term it seemed to have the desired effect, or at least no measurable negative effect, on road safety.

Similar to Dagen H, the changeover from plain old telephone service, POTS, to VoIP will deeply challenge ingrained customs. For 100 years, telecommunications has been carried on a closed proprietary network, highly stable but limited in its applications, and connected to tens of millions of cheap appliances, dumb terminals called phones. A utility.

As voice over IP and voice over the Internet grow, telecom will change to become open and

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