[January 28, 2003]

Jasomi SIP Protocol Repair Engine For VoIP Attacks Interoperability Issues To Speed Deployment, Reduce Costs

Jasomi Networks announced the introduction of its powerful new Protocol Repair Engine for VoIP networks, which fixes many interoperability issues that plague multi-vendor IP-telephony roll-outs. Deployed in a service provider's network, the Protocol Repair Engine accepts VoIP packet streams, then automatically detects and repairs known incompatibilities before sending the streams onward to their ultimate destination. The Protocol Repair Engine is also capable of adjusting voice stream contents to account for errors in the destination equipment's programming, even if the inbound voice packet streams are not themselves in error.

The highly customizable product is targeted at carriers and service providers that cannot afford to wait for the patches and bug fixes from their equipment vendors, which may be many months away. It also gives service providers the ability to support a large number of emerging SIP-based IP-phones and soft-phones, many of which are on their first revision of their programming code, and are not yet widely interoperable.

"The SIP protocol is advancing rapidly, with many new features and implementations each quarter," noted Johnson Wu, VP of Technical Services at Jasomi Networks. "We've seen more of these problems recently due to the large number of new IP telephony equipment products currently being introduced by manufacturers. The economics of IP telephony require low customer support costs and rapid integration of new low-cost devices, which is where the Protocol Repair Engine really shines."

Actions taken by the Protocol Repair Engine include those that have been seen and fixed in Jasomi's other SIP to SIP Gateway products, such as:

• Correcting grammatical inconsistencies such as the incorrect inclusion or deletion of white space in protocol fields
• Correcting phone number formats such as the inclusion or deletion of "+" in request headers
• Accounting for semantic errors seen in some phones such as incorrect interpretations of the SIP "Cancel" and "Bye" messages
• Implementing packet compaction to avoid fragmentation of UDP call signaling packets
• Converting protocol header fields from upper case to lower case or vice versa, to ensure compatibility with equipment that requires one or the other
• Resolving incorrect implementations of DNS SRV record lookups
• Ensuring that protocol fields do not contain outrageous values that, while correctly formed, could result in undesirable behavior by other equipment in the call
• Limiting the CODECs that can be used in a call (while not strictly speaking a repair, this implements policy that is important for bandwidth management)

In addition, the Protocol Repair Engine allows for the rapid addition of new repairs, giving Jasomi the capability of responding very rapidly to new problems that occur.

Almost all Internet protocols are sufficiently mature that the mainstream parts of their implementations are correctly done, with errors occurring only in edge cases or special circumstances. However, VoIP protocols are new and complex enough to have bugs in even the ordinary, mainstream parts of their implementations. Coupled with the new entry of a large number of equipment providers from around the world, this complexity has led to the emergence of interoperability as a major issue for manufacturers and customers alike. Indeed, widely attended gatherings are held several times per year where vendors get together to try out their equipment and see if it works together. The introduction of the Jasomi Protocol Repair Engine is in line with Jasomi's mission of removing barriers to the widespread deployment of Internet Telephony. Jasomi's other products address Network Address Translation and Firewall problems that occur during VoIP deployments.

The existence of the Jasomi Protocol Repair Engine in a service provider's network greatly broadens the base of equipment that can interoperate. Some repairs are as simple as adding or removing a space character in a message packet. Others are more involved, and require changing the instructions that one machine sends another. Ultimately, the vendors of the equipment involved in a call will repair the protocol errors themselves, but customers can be damaged by waiting weeks or months for a fix. The Jasomi Protocol Repair Engine not only fixes well-known interoperability problems, but also provides a rapid development environment in which new repairs can be generated in minutes or hours, not weeks or months. The result is that service providers using the Protocol Repair Engine will be able to take advantage of the latest technologies several months ahead of their competitors who wait for fixes from the manufacturer.

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