Interest in Voice over IP (VoIP) has risen substantially in recent times, both from service providers’ and from consumers’ points of view.
While the concept of transferring Voice over data networks like the Internet is known already for a long time, only now has this technology become a major alternative to the classic Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
With Voice over IP calls being offered for free or via flat rates, Spam over Internet Telephony (SPIT) has at least the same potential to become a major annoyance for users worldwide, similar  to the current situation with e-mail spam. From a technological point of view, both communication methods have many similarities. For example, calling a huge user-base through a VoIP solution can be very cost effective for any sender; it can also be easily personalized. While such a development would naturally be annoying to individual users, a large spread of SPIT would reduce the attractiveness of VoIP in general and slow down its further commercial development.

The SPIDER project will deliver a solution to detect and prevent unsolicited VoIP calls and instant messages. This solution will not only be designed to achieve a high detection rate, but it will also be resource efficient as well. Without such balance, SPIT prevention will introduce high deployment costs and large processing delays, hence reducing the willingness for providers and users to actually deploy such tools.
Besides providing new tools and products, SPIDER will aim at enhancing denial of service protection tools for VoIP infrastructures that have been designed and developed in the earlier SNOCER (Low Cost Tools for Secure and Highly Available VoIP Communication Services) project.

The SPIDER project has a duration of 24 months, and started on October 1, 2006. Besides the project coordinator Fraunhofer FOKUS, the project has 5 partners.

Objectives

From the technical point of view, SPIDER will be aiming at securing VoIP infrastructures by providing Spam protection. It will be concentrated on increasing the work experience in VoIP infrastructure from a user’s point of view by limiting the possibility for unsolicited messages to reach the user.

The objectives of this part of the work will thus be:

• Design and implement a framework for secure VoIP calls to avoid misuse of VoIP for spam delivery
• Specify and develop tools for spam detection and suppression
• Support different means for detection that can be added based on user and provider specific needs
• Integration and testing of developed tools and solutions in a provider’s VoIP infrastructure

Partner

• Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany (Project Coordination)

• Eleven GmbH, Germany

• Nextsoft, Czech Republic

• Telio, Norway

• Voztelecom, Spain

• University of the Aegean, Greece