Packetizer Labs

Since its inception, Packetizer has been the one stop shop for all things ▲VoIP. The extensive library of information contained within Packetizer's web pages has been a plentiful source of information on anything and everything VoIP. Drawing on this extensive knowledge, Packetizer now sees itself being in the unique position to take the lead in forging groundbreaking next generation VoIP products and services. Today, many areas still need to be addressed to make wholesale adoption of VoIP as the primary method of interconnecting people a reality. The purpose of Packetizer Labs to develop solutions to bridge that gap between VoIP's potential and it's commercial reality.

Based in Singapore, Packetizer Labs brings an international perspective to development, Bringing a fresh face and design perspectives to this emerging industry. Focused on developing cost effective yet fully functional VoIP solutions, Packetizer Labs strives to fill the need in develop functional but still inter operative solutions to some of the more perplexing issues in standards based protocols .

Areas of research

• Caller Authentication and Security
• Efficient and native NAT/Firewall traversal solutions
• Presence and Instant messaging

Caller Authentication and Security

There has been a lot of discussion within the VoIP community to develop an efficient method to determine whether the incoming caller is really who they say they are and to reduce VoIP networks susceptibility to the problems that plague email and traditional phone networks namely cold calling or SPAM or in VoIP lingo SPIT. (Spam over Internet Telephony) . To date, solution have focused on simple admission security at the network's border elements usually involving user/password or originators IP address and not involving the hard/soft phones themselves, however with the expansion of VoIP and the extensive interconnections required for large scale VoIP deployment across many providers and many geographic regions, to enforce these policies become cumbersome as traffic has to be routed through approved IP addresses and a lot of internetwork trust is required. Packetizer Labs realizes the need to develop an efficient method by which caller and callee can identify themselves to each other directly without relying on the Trust their applicable providers have with each other.

Securing VoIP communication has also become another major challenge for the VoiP community, primarily how to achieve security without compromising performance, bandwidth and interoperability. Many solutions have been put forward however non fill all the requirements as they either need VoIP infrastructure upgrade or require intermediaries to allow these devices to communicate with legacy devices.

eaRTP

eaRTP or Encryption and Authentication over standard RTP is an elegant yet simple solution put forward by Packetizer Labs to provide Authentication and Security support to any standard H.323 network. Based on existing H.235.2 and H.235.6 standards eaRTP delivers high encrypted media without the media establishment delays.

View Draft Technical Paper (updated 28 Nov 2005) (pdf) .

Proof of concept sample application (windows dos application) (zip file)

Biometric and Smart Card Authenticators and VoIP

Packetizer Labs is currently working on the development of H.235 plugin support into PacPhone so users can be authenticated beyond the traditional uername and password to include biometric (thumbprint, IRIS scan) and smartcard (keyfob,USB devices etc). This greatly improves security support in VoIP.

NAT/Firewall traversal solutions

The holy grail of VoIP, How to traverse VoIP media across Network Address Translation (NAT) boxes without the need to make configuration changes or purchase special hardware. Some non-standard VoIP solutions have overcome this problem using peer-to-peer technology however only recently have standards based implementations successfully achieved this ability. Packetizer Labs is at the forefront of developing and pioneering standards based NAT Traversal technology and are aggressively developing applications and solutions to fill this market need.

There are 2 main standards for H.323 for Native Nat Traversal.

• H460.18 Traversal of Signalling (zip file)
• H460.19 Traversal of Media (zip file)

There is a another method implemented in the Open Source Gatekeeper www.gnugk.org and technical document Click Here.

P2Pnat Media

The existing standards and systems require the proxying of media through an intermediary. P2Pnat Media or Point to Point through NAT media is the evolutionary next step, pioneered by packetizer labs, to enable the streaming of media directly between parties behind NAT devices without requiring the Proxy of media.

• Outline of P2Pnat Media

P2Pnat media contains 2 new H.460 proposed standards currently working documents at the ITU.

• Nat Type determination of H.323 systems
• Point to Point Media though NAT in H.323 systems

Presence and Instant Messaging

We are working closely with members of the ITU and the development community to develop software and daft standards for the incorporation of multi-server presence (contact list status) and Instant Messaging services into H.323 networks. As of v1.1.9 PacPhone supports secure instant messaging. It utilises the existing eaRTP procedure, lightweight call setup and the H.323 extensibility framework to enable sending and receiving of encrypted instant messages across pre-existing H.323 networks.

Instant Messaging proposal has now been accepted as a working document at the ITU and can be downloaded from Here.

Other cool things from Packetizer Labs

AES Crypt		We created a very cool program called AES Crypt, which allows you to encrypt and decrypt files using 256-bit AES encryption, either from Windows or from Linux.
PGP Primer		Oh, before we created AES Crypt, we used to use PGP. We still consider that a great software program and wrote a PGP Primer that might be useful.
Towers of Hanoi, Sierpinski's Triangle		Algorithms are interesting. Some are complex and some are trivial. Sometimes it is the ones that are most trivial that are the most interesting. We have two good examples that one might consider great classics. One is the Towers of Hanoi and the other is Sierpinski's Triangle.
Cambridge Obfuscator		Here's something cool: the Cambridge Obfuscator. You can paste a paragraph full of text into the window and the program will follow simple rules to scramble the letters in the middle of words and, amazingly, the words are still readable.
Hide Email Address		We also have a little script that you can use to help hide your e-mail address when you embed it in a web page. It will provide two ways to hide your e-mail address to make it more difficult for bots to retrive it.
Character Converter		We have another script that will convert characters into hexadecimal, showing both the UTF-8 and Unicode value for each character.
Web Services		From time to time, we come up with some kind interest web service that you can utilize from over the web. You can find the current web services we have implemented at services.packetizer.com.