Listen to Blue Box episodes *by phone*!

As you will hear in the soon-to-be-released show #41, listener "natas" has now made it possible for you to dial a phone number and listen to any of the Blue Box "main" shows over your phone (special edition shows coming at some point soon).  Simply dial:

+1-712-432-5355

and you will be prompted to enter in the number of the show you would like to listen to. You can press the "#" key to fast-forward, the "*" key to rewind, the "0" key to pause/resume and the "1" key to exit the episode and return to the main menu to listen to another episode.  Obviously, when you are done you can just hang up.

Given that this is an experiment, any comments people have on the usefulness (or not) of this service would be appreciated.  You can leave them here or send them in via email or audio.  If you do find the service useful, I would be curious as to why… where are you or what situation are you in where calling in to listen is easier than downloading the MP3 directly and listening?  I’d really like to know.  (natas indicates he is doing this for some other podcasts and is having people call in.)

Many thanks to natas for setting this up and I look forward to any feedback listeners have. 

P.S. For those interested, natas has a phone connection coming from a VoIP service provider into his Asterisk server where he as the IVR set up.  He has uploaded (with our permission) the show MP3s onto his Asterisk server and whichever one is requested is then played for the caller.

Security Roundtable podcast on VoIP security

FYI, I was the guest on the recent Security Roundtable podcast #5 focused on VoIP security.  I gave an overview of VoIP security issues, discussed some best practices and answered numerous questions from the group of hosts.  It was a wide-ranging discussion that covered Skype, recent legislation, enterprise network issues and much more.  It was a fun podcast to be part of and I do appreciate the SRT team inviting my participation.  If you are new to VoIP security issues in general, do give it a listen.

Blue Box #40: VoIP fraudster a fugitive, VoIP security news, business continuity, Namibians jailed for VoIP, and much more…

Synopsis:VoIP fraudster now a fugitive, Namibians jailed for VoIP, business continuity, Skype security and more.

Welcome to Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast #39, a 36-minute podcast  from Dan York and Jonathan Zar covering VoIP security news, comments and opinions.

Download the show here (MP3, 15MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.

You may also listen to this podcast right now:

 Show Content:

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.  Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at either +1-206-350-2583 or via SIP to ‘bluebox@voipuser.org‘ to leave a comment there.

Thank you for listening and please do let us know what you think of the show.

Blue Box #39: VoIP security news, VON conference update, 802.11 and PKI, listener comments, more

Synopsis:VoIP security news, comments and opinions – Skype security, fugitive CEOs, Phil Zimmermann, Paris Hilton, the IETF and more.

Welcome to Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast #39, a 42-minute podcast  from Dan York and Jonathan Zar covering VoIP security news, comments and opinions. In this week’s show, we cover recent news, what happened at the VON show, 802.11 wireless security and more…

Download the show here (MP3, 17MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.

You may also listen to this podcast right now:

 Show Content:

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.  Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at either +1-206-350-2583 or via SIP to ‘bluebox@voipuser.org‘ to leave a comment there.

Thank you for listening and please do let us know what you think of the show.

One-year anniversary show coming up Oct 24th… if you have any comments/segments you’d like to contribute…

October 24th will mark one-year of doing this show and we’re planning to talk a bit about that anniversary: some of the things we’ve learned – both about VoIP security and also about podcasting – and see what other announcements we can come out with.

If you would like to contribute a comment or segment to that episode, we will most likely be recording that show on Friday, October 20th, so please send in via email or call in any contributions by the end of Thursday, October 19th.  If you want to call in or send in comments in advance but want us to hold them for that show, just say so at the beginning of the audio comment or in an email and we’ll hold them for that show.  Many thanks to all of you who have been listening to us over all this time!

Blue Box #38: VoIP security news, Skype security, fugitive CEOs, Phil Zimmermann, Paris Hilton, the IETF and more…

Synopsis:VoIP security news, comments and opinions – Skype security, fugitive CEOs, Phil Zimmermann, Paris Hilton, the IETF and more.

Welcome to Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast #38, a 49-minute podcast  from Dan York and Jonathan Zar covering VoIP security news, comments and opinions. In this week’s show, we cover fugitive CEOs, Phil Zimmermann, Paris Hilton, the IETF, Skype and more…

Download the show here (MP3, 20MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.

You may also listen to this podcast right now:

NOTE: This show was originally recorded on September 6th and was delayed due to some of the audio quality issues that you will note in the show itself.

 Show Content:

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.  Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at either +1-206-350-2583 or via SIP to ‘bluebox@voipuser.org‘ to leave a comment there.

Thank you for listening and please do let us know what you think of the show.

Asterisk configuration for SIP voicemail-to-email

As you will hear shortly on show #38, there were two main responses regarding my query about having a SIP address for a comment line that would record a voicemail message and send it to my email address.  One response led to the hosted SIP comment line that we recently announced.  The other response, from Julien Goodwin, was an explanation of how to do this in Asterisk.  While I personally don’t have the time to administer systems and run my own Asterisk server, I thought I would post it here for others to see and experiment with.

Julien provided the following configuration, noting that he had not tested this, but it was based off of his working configuration:

extensions.conf:

[sip-guest]
s,1,goto(bluebox,1)
i,1,goto(bluebox,1)

bluebox,1,answer
bluebox,n,Voicemail(u1)
bluebox,n,hangup

[some-private-context]
bluebox-admin,1,Voicemailmain(1) ; User side of VM, to set message

sip.conf:
[general]
context = sip-guest
disallow=all                    ; Disallow all codecs
allow=ulaw                      ; Allow codecs in order of preference
allow=alaw
allow=gsm
allow=ilbc
; G729 could also be allowed if your system has a license

voicemail.conf: 
[default]
1 => 12345,Bluebox Comments 
Box,blueboxpodcast@gmail.com,,attach=yes|delete=1|format=wav

(NOTE: These last two lines were split for formatting but should
be merged onto a single line.)

Thank you, Julien, for providing this and if people find it useful and/or make suggestions/comments, please do leave those as comments to this post.

Blue Box SE #11: IMS Security interview with Morgan Stern

Synopsis:Interview about IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) security with Morgan Stern.

Welcome to Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast special edition #11, a 17-minute podcast  from Dan York and Jonathan Zar containing an interview with Morgan Stern, Principal Consultant at Lucent Worldwide Services about the security of IMS systems.

Download the show here (MP3, 7MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.

You may also listen to this podcast right now:

In this interview, I spoke with Morgan Stern, Principal Consultant, Global Convergence Center of Excellence, Lucent Worldwide Services, about the security of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture.  Morgan has just been part of a panel session at Fall VON 2006 in Boston entitled "Securing Communication for IMS" and we covered a range of security topics, including:

  • The differences between centralized and distributed architectures
  • The various standards bodies involved with IMS
  • The emergence of "A-IMS"
  • How do we do distributed security?
  • How do we verify the authenticity of end devices?
  • Is IMS hype or reality?
  • Are there really new and innovative services coming out for IMS?
  • What are the major security issues for IMS?
  • Lawful intercept and its issues
  • His role at Lucent and what his work there is about

Morgan also provided a copy of his IMS security presentation that you may download and also mentioned a Light Reading webinar he did on IMS in general that listeners may find of interest.

If you are interested in IMS security, you may also want to listen to Blue Box podcast #35, where we interviewed author Miguel Garcia for his perspective on IMS security.

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.  Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at either +1-206-350-2583 or via SIP to ‘bluebox@voipuser.org‘ to leave a comment there.

Thank you for listening and please do let us know what you think of the show.

New SIP comment line – bluebox@voipuser.org

Thanks to Dean over at voipuser.org, along with Martyn Davies who did some great testing, we now have a comment line to which you can connect via SIP.  All you need to do is use your SIP phone to call the address:

bluebox@voipuser.org

(Please note that this is NOT an email address, but rather a SIP address.)  Martyn and Dean have both left messages and it seems to work well. 

If you have a SIP phone with the ability to call across the Internet, please do give it a try and leave us a message.  Feedback is definitely welcome.  Again, many thanks to Dean for setting this up and to Martyn for helping with testing.

P.S. As a bonus, we also now have a PSTN comment line in the UK: +44 844 933 6305.  If you want to give that number a try, please do!