Detect and Prevent SIP Flooding Attacks in VoLTE by Utilizing a Two-Tier PFilter Design

Abstract

As a new generation voice service, Voice over LTE (VoLTE) has attracted worldwide attentions in both the academia and industry. Different from the traditional voice call based on circuit-switched (CS), VoLTE evolves into the packet-switched (PS) field, which has long been open to the public. Though designed rigorously, similar to VoIP services, VoLTE also suffers from SIP (Session Initiation Protocal) flooding attacks. Due to the high performance requirement, the SIP flooding attacks in VoLTE is more difficult to defend than that in traditional VoIP service. In this paper, enlightened by Counting Bloom Filter (CBF), we design a versatile CBF-like structure, PFilter, to detect the flooding anomalies. Compared with previous relevant works, our scheme gains advantages in many aspects including detection of low-rate flooding attack and stealthy flooding attack. Moreover, not only can our scheme detect the attacks with high accuracy, but also find out the attackers to ensure normal operation of VoLTE by eliminating their negative effects. Extensive experiments are performed to well evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme.