TippingPoint doubles down on VoIP security

CHICAGO--

Intrusion prevention provider TippingPoint Technologies has been pulled into the service provider space by the security demands of voice-over-IP. This week at Supercomm 2004, the Austin, Texas-based company accepted the invitation by launching its UnityOne Intrusion Prevention Systems for VoIP.

UnityOne protects VoIP infrastructure from denial-of-service attacks and other threats at multi-gigabit speeds. It also protects against security holes in protocols used in VoIP such as session initiation protocol and H.323.

“Ultimately, what our box does is very finely classify different traffic types going though the network. We then have a whole family of actions we can take once we identify that traffic that includes alerting, notifying, blocking and shaping it,” said Marc Willebeek-LeMair, chief technology and strategy officer at TippingPoint.

The company also announced the formation of a VoIP Security Research Lab that will investigate threats to the VoIP network. Lab experts will work with both vendors and service providers to analyze vulnerabilities in the infrastructure.

TippingPoint’s UnityOne intrusion prevention platform also will provide bandwidth management and content-based quality of service at gigabit speeds. The bandwidth management solution helps prioritize traffic while the QoS component helps identify high-priority traffic.

Standing behind the solutions are the results of testing with several service provider customers the company said it will be announcing soon. Over the course of six months, TippingPoint identified malicious content such as worms and viruses in 20% of its customers’ broadband traffic.

“It’s like background radiation noise that is hijacking network resources,” said Kip McClanahan, CEO of TippingPoint. “It’s made up of old attacks like worms such as Code Red that are just junk traffic that isn’t doing anyone any good and should be scrubbed.”

Test also concluded that over 50% of traffic over both cable and DSL networks was bandwidth consuming peer-to-peer applications. After deploying the UnityOne solution, carriers saw 15% to 40% increase in bandwidth availability. TippingPoint claims that the return on investment for every $100,000 invested in UnityOne was $1 million to $2 million.

“The cost associated with the threat impact on the service provider environment is overwhelming right now,” McClanahan said. “Everyone we have talked to is very interested in cleaning up their networks.”

McClanahan claims that UnityOne is the only intrusion prevention product capable of serving the carrier space from a performance and horsepower perspective because of its multi-gigabit packet inspection speed, microsecond latency and custom ASICs chips and packet processors.

“There is rocket science in this box that actually makes it palatable to service providers whose networks are their business,” McClanahan said. “There can be no added latency. There can be no added risk. There can be nothing more than a bump in the wire while you are performing these security functions.”