VoIPChain: A decentralized identity authentication in Voice over IP using Blockchain

Abstract

Confidentiality, availability, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation when together became the top priority for secure communication. However, authentication is the first line of defense in all these security parameters. Unfortunately, several authentication mechanisms in the traditional methods cannot provide secure communication due to various vulnerabilities such as single point of failure and privacy issues. Furthermore, key distribution mechanisms such as Certificate Authority (CA) and Trusted Third Party (TTP) distribute keys over the central architecture fail, thus secure communication cannot occur. As a solution to these drawbacks, this paper proposes a new decentralized blockchain-based identity authentication mechanism for VoIP networks, VoIPChain. The proposed scheme utilizes the main features of the blockchain platform, such as immutability, transparency, and fault tolerance, to provide data privacy and secure communication in VoIP applications. The proposed scheme is evaluated as an actual implementation using the virtual Ethereum platform and Python language. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is an efficient and cost-effective solution for the call process as a decentralized identity authentication system in VoIP. In addition, end-to-end secure call performance outperforms the existing blockchain-based authentication mechanisms by 30%-70% in terms of average time delay. The proposed scheme is almost ten times faster than the TLS process to authenticate between parties. Moreover, compared to fast but less secure basic methods over the SIP authentication the proposed scheme has an acceptable time delay in a call process.