ABSTRACT
This paper examines the use of videoconferencing systems for production (metallurgical) site management. Such systems help achieve a significant reduction in costs associated with meetings and related business trips. Application of such systems was especially wide-spread during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, none of the existing systems takes into account certain features typical of the corporate network infrastructure. Sophisticated communication systems consisting of various segments, as well as of symmetric and asymmetric channels with multiple parameters, which may vary numerous times, make it more difficult to build efficient VoIP solutions, especially when growing videoconferencing services. As the typical approach to securing confidentiality when transmitting voice and video data across communication networks implies that every sender-receiver route is considered public, it loses the benefits of network topology control in the corporate sector. At the same time, the typical client-server architecture across corporate IP networks demonstrates lower performance when compared with peer-to-peer networking because of lesser use of network infrastructure knowledge. The authors propose a new approach to building secured corporate communication systems, which does not have at its basis the client-server architecture but rather a p2p architecture. The latter enables to take into account the existing corporate network structure (including that of a metallurgical company), unload external and internal communication channels and reduce the computing costs at the host level. © 2023, Ore and Metals Publishing house. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Qualitative research has been strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the possibilities that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies such as Skype, WhatsApp, and Zoom offer to qualitative scholars. Based on the experience of using such technologies to collect qualitative data for our PhD studies, we present how we dealt with the challenges of this interview mode. Precisely, we discuss problems related to rapport, technology, digital exclusion, and ethics frequently pointed out in the methodological literature on online interviews. Thereby we put forward strategies and techniques that helped us to 1) build a rapport, 2) manage technical difficulties, 3) reflect on risks of digital exclusion, and 4) comply with the ethical standards of our institution. In doing so, we draw on our qualitative data to support the arguments. The aim of this paper is, thus, to deepen the methodological debate on online interviews in social sciences. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
Digital forensic analysis of videoconferencing applications has received considerable attention recently, owing to the wider adoption and diffusion of such applications following the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In this contribution, we present a detailed forensic analysis of Cisco WebEx which is among the top three videoconferencing applications available today. More precisely, we present the results of the forensic investigation of Cisco WebEx desktop client, web, and Android smartphone applications. We focus on three digital forensic areas, namely memory, disk space, and network forensics. From the extracted artifacts, it is evident that valuable user data can be retrieved from different data localities. These include user credentials, emails, user IDs, profile photos, chat messages, shared media, meeting information including meeting passwords, contacts, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) keys, keyword searches, timestamps, and call logs. We develop a memory parsing tool for Cisco WebEx based on the extracted artifacts. Additionally, we identify anti-forensic artifacts such as deleted chat messages. Although network communications are encrypted, we successfully retrieve useful artifacts such as IPs of server domains and host devices along with message/event timestamps.
ABSTRACT
As the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally reshaped the remote life and working styles, Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony and video conferencing have become a primary method of connecting communities together. However, little has been done to understand the feasibility and limitations of delivering adversarial voice samples via such communication channels. In this paper, we propose TAINT-Targeted Adversarial Voice over IP Network, the first targeted, query-efficient, hard label black-box, adversarial attack on commercial speech recognition platforms over VoIP. The unique channel characteristics of VoIP pose significant new challenges, such as signal degradation, random channel noise, frequency selectivity, etc. To address these challenges, we systematically analyze the structure and channel characteristics of VoIP through reverse engineering. A noise-resilient efficient gradient estimation method is then developed to ensure a steady and fast convergence of the adversarial sample generation process. We demonstrate our attack in both over-the-air and over-the-line settings on four commercial automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems over the five most popular VoIP Conferencing Software (VCS). We show that TAINT can achieve performance that is comparable to the existing methods even with the addition of VoIP channel. Even in the most challenging scenario where there is an active speaker in Zoom, TAINT can still succeed within 10 attempts while staying out of the speaker focus of the video conference. © 2022 Owner/Author.
ABSTRACT
Videoconferencing applications have seen a jump in their userbase owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. The security of these applications has certainly been a hot topic since millions of VoIP users’ data is involved. However, research pertaining to VoIP forensics is still limited to Skype and Zoom. This paper presents a detailed forensic analysis of Microsoft Teams, one of the top 3 videoconferencing applications, in the areas of memory, disk-space and network forensics. Extracted artifacts include critical user data, such as emails, user account information, profile photos, exchanged (including deleted) messages, exchanged text/media files, timestamps and Advanced Encryption Standard encryption keys. The encrypted network traffic is investigated to reconstruct client-server connections involved in a Microsoft Teams meeting with IP addresses, timestamps and digital certificates. The conducted analysis demonstrates that, with strong security mechanisms in place, user data can still be extracted from a client’s desktop. The artifacts also serve as digital evidence in the court of Law, in addition to providing forensic analysts a reference for cases involving Microsoft Teams. © 2022, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.
ABSTRACT
The demand for the telecommunication services, such as IP telephony, has increased dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. IP telephony should be enhanced to provide the expected quality. One of the issues that should be investigated in IP telephony is bandwidth utilization. IP telephony produces very small speech samples attached to a large packet header. The header of the IP telephony consumes a considerable share of the bandwidth allotted to the IP telephony. This wastes the network's bandwidth and influences the IP telephony quality. This paper proposes a mechanism (called Smallerize) that reduces the bandwidth consumed by both the speech sample and the header. This is achieved by assembling numerous IP telephony packets in one header and use the header's fields to carry the speech sample. Several metrics have been used to measure the achievement Smallerize mechanism. The number of calls has been increased by 245.1% compared to the typical mechanism. The bandwidth saving has also reached 68% with the G.28 codec. Therefore, Smallerize is a possible mechanism to enhance bandwidth utilization of the IP telephony.
ABSTRACT
The demands on virtual communication have increased noticeably during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. As an essential part of virtual communication, VoIP should be promoted to achieve the desired level of performance. One critical area investigated in VoIP is the bandwidth utilization (BWU) of the VoIP over IPv6 networks. Enhancing BWU will impact call capacity and quality;it increases call capacity and boosts call quality. Unfortunately, a considerable amount of bandwidth is wasted when running VoIP over IPv6 networks. This is due to the large size of the IPv6 header and the small size of the speech frame. This paper proposes a new method to handle the inefficient BWU when running VoIP over IPv6 networks. The proposed method combines multiplexing multiple VoIP packets in one IPv6 header and using the superfluous fields to carry a portion of the speech frame. Therefore, the proposed is called packet multiplexing and carrier fields (PMCF). Investigation of the PCMF method has been done using four metrics to measure the promotion in BWU, namely calls capacity, header size, bandwidth saving, and speech frame shortening metrics. With the four metrics, the PMCF method has outperformed the comparable methods. For instance, the call capacity has been promoted by up to 269% compared to the typical IPv6 method in the tested scenarios. Therefore, the PMCF method is a feasible solution to facilitate the BWU of VoIP when running VoIP over IPv6 networks.