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VoIP Gets a New P2P Routing Protocol (DUNDi) 76

Posted by michael from the transylvania-6-5000 dept.
bkw.org writes "Today Digium released DUNDi which can be used with the Asterisk Open Source PBX for p2p call routing. Digum has also released a whitepaper (pdf) on DUNDi so others can implement this new technology into their products and give VoIP a push into the mainstream." Voxilla also has a story.
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VoIP Gets a New P2P Routing Protocol (DUNDi) More

VoIP Gets a New P2P Routing Protocol (DUNDi)

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  • P2P VOIP (Score:5, Funny)

    by stanmann ( 602645 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @12:33PM (#10567107) Journal
    Great, Now I can get telemarketers trying to enlarge my bank software in nigeria, and viruses on my VOIP line and in my e-mail
    • Actually, if you read the white-paper, it has built in ways to mark subscribers as unavailable for unsolicited or unsolicited commercial calls. If a peer violates this, they are legally liable to *all* peers. (if I read it right).

  • Another great move (Score:5, Informative)

    by salemnic ( 244944 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @12:33PM (#10567122)
    * is awesome, and for anyone who hasn't given it a shot, I definitely recommend it. Digium even sells some FXS/FXO cards if you want it to replace your traditional in-house system.

    Something neat for every geek!

    s.
    • Yep definately agree Digium rocks.

      You can find more information about Dundi here:

      http://www.sineapps.com/news.php?rssid=240
    • How cheaply can a home system be completed?

      I'm very interested but in the past it didn't seem like it was cost effective.
      • Just built one for:

        $200 for the FXO and FXS
        and 1 recycled PII-450.

        Pretty cheap, if you ask me.

      • Re:How affordable? (Score:3, Informative)

        by salemnic ( 244944 )
        You can use any decent recycled PC for the * server. I'm running a Duron 850 with 256MB RAM, but I understand even slower will work.

        There are actually a couple of ways of doing it. You can use something like Voicepulse Connect [voicepulse.com] and for $8 per month for an incoming number (48 states) and/or about $.03 a minute get calling anywhere in the USA or Canada. Even outbound local numbers cost this way, though.

        The other option is to buy a digium fxs/fxo card and plug into the regular PSTN. The card can run as li

  • Is this a... (Score:5, Funny)

    by davidsyes ( 765062 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @12:35PM (#10567142) Homepage Journal
    --crock
    --crocodile
    --crock o' dial
    --dun deal

    OK, cold & dumb...lame attempts at humor

  • Before everyone says... (Score:5, Informative)

    by einhverfr ( 238914 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [srevart.sirhc]> on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @12:36PM (#10567152) Homepage Journal
    What do we need this for? Don't we have enough protocols?

    This is actually pretty cool from a distributed PBX perspective. I am not sure I would want to use it over the internet with untrusted PBX's but it would be pretty useful inside a large corporate structure.

  • The New Baby Bells (Score:4, Interesting)

    by I Hate Spam Alot ( 742299 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @12:37PM (#10567161)
    Wonder if this will sping up into localized phone services like wifi and cheap fiber based internet did for small towns. The whole town chips in and gets to kick out the big corp. and run the local service as the citizan see fit. Plus it will be cool to run in my house!

  • Cool (Score:3, Funny)

    by LittLe3Lue ( 819978 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @12:37PM (#10567171)
    Maybe soon I'll be able to call l33tMovieRipper over xyz P2Pclient and ask for The Matrix in person.

    >

    • Maybe soon I'll be able to call l33tMovieRipper over xyz P2Pclient and ask for The Matrix in person.

      You haven't seen it yet?

      I guess this fits in with what I don't understand about possessing entertainment media like movies and books. Once I've seen/read it, I don't need it anymore. Movies are seen in theaters or rented on DVD. Books are borrowed or purchased then donated to the local public library. I don't understand this type of consumerism media hoarding.

      • Quite simply, because very often movies exit from the theaters and video rental places get rid of most if not all of their copies of the movies. What if you want to see a movie that's not /at/ your video store again?

  • Will Hatch ban VoIP? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by grunt107 ( 739510 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @12:45PM (#10567236)
    Given that Orrin wants all P2P technology banned, would this be terminated as well if he succeeds?

    Or does this give P2P the legitimacy it needs to exists.

    I vote the latter but I am biased for P2P tech anyway.
    • " Given that Orrin wants all P2P technology banned, would this be terminated as well if he succeeds?
      Or does this give P2P the legitimacy it needs to exists."

      This is the first app to give P2P legitimacy.
      If corps start using it over VPNs to connect branch/remote locations to the main office then P2P is here to stay as they will buy Hach's opinion.
      -nB
      • Skype is considered P2P and it's a plenty legitimate application, and it uses standard SIP for it's protocol. Being that SIP is a widely used protocol I'd think that it would hold the precedence in most legitimate P2P VOIP app.
        • Skype doesn't doesn't communicate with any standard SIP service, I don't think it uses SIP at all. It uses their own proprietry protocol encrypted with AES.

          • Oh man, you're totally right. I don't know what I was thinking... You're right though, Skype does use a proprietary encrypted protocol.

          • Skype and Standards and Alternatives (Score:4, Insightful)

            by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @03:54PM (#10569210) Journal
            Skype prefers to do things that are "better" than the current standards, and does them in a proprietary way to protect their potential profits, and doesn't document their protocols because they're not interested in having random people develop software that interconnects with them. (Make whatever judgements you'd like about that... :-) However, unlike many vendors who take that approach, they've at least done a decent job of it.
            • They're using audio codecs from Global Ip Sound [globalipsound.com], who make codecs that are more tolerant of high packet loss than most of the low-bit-rate public-standard codecs, and also better-than-telco-quality higher-bandwidth codecs. It looks like Global IP is working on getting some of their codecs into the standards track. [globalipsound.com]
            • They view NAT traversal as a critical design element, because NAT's become extremely widespread (in spite of being evil breakage of the end-to-end paradigm), so they've done more than the SIP standards do to simplify that. (SIP came from Internet people, so it was far, far better than the H.323 stuff that came from the ISDN crowd, and it's easy to set up firewalls for SIP transparency, but NAT traversal takes extra work.)
            • They view security as a critical requirement, so they've got modern crypto algorithms like AES in there, and from a performance standpoint it's a really big win to encrypt the data packets rather than using IPSEC tunnels, because VOIP data is inherently small compared to the headers. Unfortunately, because of their attitudes about proprietariness and no public documentation, it's not possible for the crypto community to examine their protocols or code, and most crypto mistakes these days are made in protocol implementations, not in the fundamental algorithms, so even though they use AES and Diffie-Hellmann and long enough keys, that doesn't mean they're not totally hosed.
            • P2P is fun, and can scale well by taking load off the central server, and the Skype folks don't want to run a huge central server. This has some conveniences for their design (supernodes for NAT traversal assistance, etc.), and creates some interesting security tradeoffs (no central point of attack, but widely distributed local attack points) which are unfortunately covered up by the lack of protocol documentation.

      • This is the first app to give P2P legitimacy.

        ... Usenet, 1979, anyone?

        Peer-to-peer technology has been around and has been in common usage for many, many years. I can't name any well known peer-to-peer systems before 1979, but I'm quite sure there were some.

        P2P had legitimacy long before illegal file sharing came along.

  • Javasterisk? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @12:49PM (#10567280) Homepage Journal
    Who's running a Java app server controlling their Asterisk PBX, or being controlled by it?

    • Re:Javasterisk? (Score:3, Informative)

      by abigor ( 540274 )
      I read about this on the Asterisk mailing list:

      http://sourceforge.net/projects/jasterisk/

      Of course, you'd have to layer your EJBs/servlets/whathaveyou on top, but hey, it's a start. And it gets you away from the horrible Asterisk Manager interface.

  • Language trivia of the day (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @12:50PM (#10567291)
    dundi means chubby in Hungarian.

  • Here come the security problems. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @12:50PM (#10567295) Homepage Journal
    Remember when closing off your email servers from open relaying was a skill that not everyone had a grasp of? Here we go again. While I do agree that VoIP inevitably requires more advanced routing, it is my fear that this will be abused for a long time until admins become skilled in the art of preventing unwanted forwards. In the meantime, you'll have...
    • Skript kiddiez abusing it to go VoIP-to-landline on someone else's nickel (oh yes, the days of phreaking are coming back)
    • Bulk dialers. You thought telemarketers were bad? Wait until the spammers get a hold of free calls to your home!
    I fear for the future... :)

    • Re:Here come the security problems. (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Read the GPA. These issues are addressed, specifically in section 2, the acceptable use policy.
      1. While I do agree that VoIP inevitably requires more advanced routing, it is my fear that this will be abused for a long time until admins become skilled in the art of preventing unwanted forwards.

      I'm even more of a pesimist (aka realist).

      Yesterday's security issues have not even been addressed today.

      It all boils down to how much pain someone feels at this moment in time.

      That's why viruses and spyware are seen as the primary security issues, while system security itself -- something that would e

    • RTFA (Score:2)

      by lorcha ( 464930 )
      From TFA:

      DUNDi is not itself a Voice over IP signalling or media protocol. Instead, it publishes routes which are in turn accessed via industry standard protocols such as IAX(TM), SIP and H.323.

      No one is going to be spam-calling you through DUNDi. It's basically a distributed "white pages" with no single point of failure.

      Hell, you couldn't even be bothered to read the name before sticking your foot in your mouth. DUNDi stands for "Distributed Universal Number Discovery".

  • encryption? wiretap? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by r00t ( 33219 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @12:51PM (#10567299) Journal
    P2P changes things. The FBI might not like this.

    Number assignment is an issue too, unless you
    can dial a "number" that looks like an email
    address or a URL.
    • You place a call request to one presence server that has a given URI for the person you're wanting to call, including their ID on the server. From there your SIP endpoint software does the rest, including calling landline endpoints.

      An example would be:

      sip:foo@mysipserver.net

      Another would be:

      sip:18005551212@mysipserver.net

      In the first case, you're calling directly to another SIP endpoint. In the second, you could be calling a SIP endpoint or a PSTN terminated endpoint- the URI wouldn't matter.

  • Uninformative intro again... (Score:5, Informative)

    by The Famous Brett Wat ( 12688 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @12:56PM (#10567357) Homepage Journal
    DUNDi stands for "Distributed Universal Number Discovery". It is a peer to peer system for locating Internet gateways to telephony services. Unlike traditional centralized services (such as ENUM), DUNDi is fully distributed, with no central authority. DUNDi is not a Voice over IP signalling or media protocol: it publishes routes which are in turn accessed via industry standard protocols such as IAX, SIP and H.323.

    The above information is taken (with minor edits) from the dundi.com website. It's the sort of information that would have been useful in the executive summary, IMHO.

  • CALLEA Anyone (Score:2, Insightful)

    by GoodNicsTken ( 688415 )
    This is exactly why the VoIP providers should not be required to provide a voice stream back to the softswitch. The criminals will start using something like this.

    In the mmean time the VoIP industry will spend billions on upgrades (All passed on to the consumer) to provide the FBI a tap that is so easily defeated.

    Wtite the FCC about this. Get involved, join the EFF!
  • it seems that DUNDi is now a 'done deal'. get it!?!?

    HA!

    ...2 minutes after this post my karma changed to 'throw yourself out the nearest window'

  • Where does the trust build from? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CharlieHedlin ( 102121 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:33PM (#10567697)
    It seems to me that the enum standard should work, and that this requires too much trust building.
    In the case of a corporate PBX, couldn't enum be used with distributed redundant DNS servers?

    I use Asterisk, it is great, and I like the idea of DUNDI, but by the time you get a web of trust built, why not just use enum?

    • Re:Where does the trust build from? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Gaewyn L Knight ( 16566 ) <vaewyn.wwwrogue@com> on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:43PM (#10567791) Homepage Journal
      Easy answer... ENUM requires that you trust a central body in control of the use of your records. Havn't we all learned from DNS and Verisign?

    • Re:Where does the trust build from? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Scott Laird ( 2043 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @02:13PM (#10568144) Homepage
      Well, look at things this way: ENUM has been around for *years*, yet there's still no official ENUM tree. There's no way for VoIP carriers like Vonage to publish SIP addresses for the PSTN numbers that they service.

      Why? Because of political squabbling by telcos, verisign, and the like. Whoever controls the ENUM tree will be able to control the future of telecommunications. That means money and power, and that's why there's no progress occuring--all of the usual players are jockeying for position, and will be for years.

      Since ENUM is really just a DNS tree, that hasn't stopped people from producing their own ENUM trees (e164.org, etc), but there's nothing particularly official about any of them. They're all interim solutions, and none of them are big enough to be able to make a difference on their own.

      There are a couple differences with DUNDi. First, it's *designed* to be decentralized, without a single point of control (or toll collection). There's an open-source implementation right out of the gate. It at least pays lip service to spam and telemarketing issues. As long as you sign the agreement, it *should* be possible for anyone to participate. And, it already has several mid-sized providers involved.

      In short, right out of the gate, DUNDi is already ahead of ENUM, because it's already usable, while ENUM still doesn't have any way to publish numbers in the "official" e164.arpa tree. DUNDi doesn't have room for Verisign-style toll collection, while the official ENUM tree almost requires it.

      We'll see how it goes. If Vonage joins up, then DUNDi has probably won and ENUM will end up being irrelevant, because the network effect will strongly favor DUNDi.
  • Any kind of interoperability with Skype?
  • Is this just like dns except a phone number to ip mapping? It sure seems to look that way. you could have just intergrated something like this into bind and been done with it. call it a PHONE record or PBX record. Why does It have to be so complicated?
    • DNS isn't enough, since a lot of ISPs won't assign static IPs. But for a DDNS system, it sounds so simple you have to wonder why no one has done it.

      I personally could care less about calling landlines from a VOIP phone. I don't use all my cell minutes. But a free directory of VOIP numbers would be nice. This is something that people should jump on now and get standardized before we get more VOIP directories than IM services.

  • Another link (Score:2, Informative)

    by ZX81 ( 105194 )
    Here's another URL to a story on DUNDi:

    http://voxilla.com/voxstory107-nested-order0-th r es hold0.html

    Excerpt:

    Asterisk Guru May Have Solved Interconnection Dilemna

    What has been a longtime complaint of many VoIP users - the limited ability of users on separate IP networks to call each other over a direct IP-to-IP connection - may well be addressed through a new number discovery protocol developed by Mark Spencer, the lead architect behind the highly regarded open source PBX system, Asterisk.

  • Skype is now Obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bob_Robertson ( 454888 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @03:12PM (#10568800) Homepage
    And they did it to themselves.

    1: Skype uses proprietary protocols that are incompatible with any other service.

    2: Skype refuses to publish their interface profiles, so no one else can make software that is compatible.

    3: Skype has stated in no uncertain terms, over and over on their web page and FAQ, that they will never publish their API, never open their source. Period.

    Yet Skype doesn't sell their software. They maintain the full burden of development and testing, and try to pay for it by selling the service of POTS calls made through their software.

    Oh well, once the idea is in the wild, someone will "open source" it. Maybe someone will adapt the Speak Freely user interface to a P2P transport layer, maybe utilizing the Gnutella network itself? Hey, this is sounding like a good idea....

    Bob-

    • Maybe not (Score:3, Informative)

      by Wesley Felter ( 138342 )
      DUNDi and Skype are both P2P, but otherwise they are quite different. Skype uses supernodes to get through NATs; I don't think DUNDi even tries. Skype is designed to connect a huge number of PCs/phones; DUNDi looks like it's more of a server-to-server protocol (can it scale to millions of peers?). Skype users are mostly anonymous; DUNDi requires peers to negotiate contractual relationships.

      And I can't resist picking on this...

      Maybe someone will adapt the Speak Freely user interface to a P2P transport lay

  • Digum? (Score:3, Funny)

    by freeze128 ( 544774 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @03:16PM (#10568832)
    Did he say Digum? I vaguely remember some sort of sugar smacks frog saying that....

  • Most cable systems use dynamic IP addressing. Will DUNDI accommodate this?

    I presently access Free World Dialup through a conventional phone connected to the internet through a Sipura box that uses SIP protocol. The box connects to the FWD server to establish the peer to peer connection.

    The FWD server method works very well, but it's not that reliable. When the server is down, you can't dial out. An easy method of direct dialing without a dedicated server is needed.

    The Sipura box is also capable of

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