Abstract
The Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC) has emerged next generation multimedia services like presence, unified messaging, click to dial, cross network multiparty conferencing and seamless multimedia streaming services, The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is developed as Service Delivery Platform (SDP) for the FMC world. It consists of modular design with open interfaces and enables the flexibility for providing multimedia services over IP technology. In parallel this open based emerging technology has security challenges from multiple communication platforms like IP, SIP and RTP. This article explores security threats, existing solutions, their limitations and scope for IMS services enablers and application servers. The standard bodies 3-GPP and TISPAN - have standardized security to authenticate and authorize users before accessing IMS based value added services, but the solutions for security threats like Denial-of-Service (DoS), SQL-injection and fraud detection and mitigation have not developed for IMS Application Servers (AS). The extended security solution is proposed in this article by developing Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) system to secure IMS Application Servers (AS) from these vulnerabilities. We present the architectural design, attacks detection and prevention methodology, and performance evaluation of developed prototype at Open IMS FOKUS Fraunhofer Testbed as a proof of concepts and motivation for real communication environment.