Protecting IMS Networks From Attack

Just as the ecommerce companies have learned that they must go to great lengths to protect their core servers from hackers, malware and service abuses, so too must network operators who plan to offer Internet-based services using IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) technologies.

Because the Internet

is an "open" system, any user can freely connect to it at any time from any place with little effort, making it a fertile breeding ground for a wide variety of malicious and unauthorized activities. With both ecommerce and IMS, security is a necessary requirement, as any down time of the site or service means lost revenue for the company.

Ecommerce sites typically protect their infrastructure and services with a variety of security devices and techniques. These range from denial of service (DoS)/distributed DoS (DDoS) protection for HTTP request traffic to intrusion detection/prevention systems IDS/IPS) that do deep packet inspection for vulnerabilities in application traffic. Many ecommerce sites also deploy application-specific firewalls and implement SSL/HTTPS access for ecommerce transactions (see this issue, pp. 34-39).