OPNET

OPNET Technologies
7255 Woodmont Avenue
Bethesda, MD 20814
Tel: 240-497-3000
Fax: 240-497-3001
E-mail: info@opnet.com
Web: http://www.opnet.com/home.html

University: George Mason University
Sponsoring Professor: Duminda Wijesekera
Department: Information Systems and Software Engineering

The public telephone network has been evolving from manually switched wires carrying analog encoded voice of the 19th century to an automatically switched grid of copper-wired, fiber optical and radio linked portions carrying digitally encoded voice and other data. Simultaneously, as our security consciousness increases, so does our desire to keep our conversations private. Applied to the traffic traversing the globe on the public telephone network, privacy requires that our telephone companies provide us with a service whereby unintended third parties are unable to access other’s data. However, existing public telephone network infrastructures do not provide such a service. This research proposes a security architecture that provides end-to-end voice privacy and access control services within the boundaries of the existing public telephone network infrastructures. Proposed architecture uses public key cryptography for authentication and key distribution, and symmetric key cryptography for voice privacy. This work is a part of an on going project on securing telecommunication system architectures and protocols. The OPNET Modeler will be used to model this secure architecture and to determine the effect of voice quality on encrypted connection.